ly has
been carried on in a bungling way. The tendency has been to tax every
form of property that could be observed or described. And so our own
nation, like many others, has gone on, step by step, adding one tax
after another, without carefully considering the fundamental principles
of taxation or the burdens laid upon particular classes. To-day we
have a complex system, full of irregularities and imperfections. Our
taxes are poorly and unjustly assessed, and the burdens fall heavily
upon some, while others have an opportunity of escaping. We have just
entered an era of careful study of our tax systems, and the various
reports from the different states and the writings of economists are
arousing great interest on these points. When once the imperfections
are clearly understood and defined, there may be some hope of a remedy
of present abuses. To be more specific, it may be said that the
assessments of the property in counties of the same state vary between
seventeen and sixty per cent of the market valuation. Sometimes this
discrepancy is between the assessments of adjacent counties, and so
great is the variation that seldom two counties have the same standard
for assessing valuation.

The personal-property tax shows greater irregularity than this,
especially in our large cities. The tax on imports, though {424}
apparently meeting the approval of a majority of the American people,
makes, upon the whole, a rather expensive system of taxation, and it is
questionable whether sufficient revenue can be raised from this source
properly to support the government without seriously interfering with
our foreign commerce. The internal revenue has many unsatisfactory
phases. The income tax has been added to an imperfect system of
taxation, instead of being substituted for the antiquated
personal-property tax. Taxes on franchises, corporations, and
inheritances are among those more recently introduced in attempts to
reform the tax system.

The various attempts to obtain sufficient revenue to support the
government or to reform an unjust and unequal tax have led to double
taxation, and hence have laid the burden upon persons holding a
specific class of property. There are to-day no less than five methods
in which double taxation occurs in the present system of taxation of
corporations. The taxation of mortgages, because it may be shifted to
the borrower, is virtually a double tax. The great question of the
inciden