taxation."[531] Consistent application of the principle enunciated in
Curry _v._ McCanless is also discernible in two later cases in which the
Court sustained the right of a domiciliary State to tax the transfer of
intangibles kept outside its boundaries, notwithstanding that "in some
instances they may be subject to taxation in other jurisdictions, to
whose control they are subject and whose legal protection they enjoyed."
In Graves _v._ Schmidlapp[532] an estate tax was levied upon the value
of the subject of a general testamentary power of appointment
effectively exercised by a resident donee over intangibles held by
trustees under the will of a nonresident donor of the power. Viewing the
transfer of interest in said intangibles by exercise of the power of
appointment as the equivalent of ownership, the Court quoted from
McCulloch _v._ Maryland[533] to the effect that the power to tax "'is an
incident of sovereignty, and is coextensive with that to which it is an
incident.'" Again, in Central Hanover Bank & T. Co. _v._ Kelly,[534] the
Court approved a New Jersey transfer tax imposed on the occasion of the
death of a New Jersey grantor of an irrevocable trust executed, and
consisting of securities located, in New York, and providing for the
disposition of the corpus to two nonresident sons.

The costliness of multiple taxation of estates comprising intangibles is
appreciably aggravated when each of several States founds its tax not
upon different events or property rights but upon an identical basis;
namely that, the decedent died domiciled within its borders. Not only is
an estate then threatened with excessive contraction but the contesting
States may discover that the assets of the estate are insufficient to
satisfy their claims. Thus, in Texas _v._ Florida,[535] the State of
Texas filed an original petition in the Supreme Court, in which it
asserted that its claim, together with those of three other States,
exceeded the value of the estate, that the portion of the estate within
Texas alone would not suffice to discharge its own tax, and that its
efforts to collect its tax might be defeated by adjudications of
domicile by the other States. The Supreme Court disposed of this
controversy by sustaining a finding that the decedent had been domiciled
in Massachusetts, but intimated that thereafter it would take
jurisdiction in like situations only in the event that an estate did not
exceed in value the total of the confl