not a direct tax, and need not, therefore, be apportioned among
the States. During the Civil War, though not, curiously enough, until
every other source of taxable wealth had pretty well run dry, an income
tax was actually imposed by three separate Acts of Congress, the Act of
1864 levying a tax of 5 per cent. on all incomes between $600 and
$5,000, and of 10 per cent. on all incomes above $5,000. The tax
continued to be collected up to 1872, when it was repealed.

The constitutional character of the tax, when levied without
apportionment among the States of the Union, was once more fully argued
out in the Supreme Court, which in 1880 reaffirmed its decision of
1789, that a tax on incomes was not a direct tax. Some fifteen years
later, however, the question emerged again, and in a crucial form. The
Democrats came into power in 1893, and proceeded to reduce the tariff,
relying upon a tax of 2 per cent. on all incomes of over $4,000 to make
good the expected loss of revenue. The Supreme Court in 1895 shattered
all their fiscal plans and policies by pronouncing the income tax to be
a direct tax, and therefore incapable of being levied, except in strict
proportion to the population of the various States, and therefore, in
effect, incapable of being levied at all.

That decision, in all its absurdity, has stood ever since. Its
consequences were to deny to the United States Government the right to
tax incomes, to restrict it still further to customs duties as
virtually its sole source of revenue, to deprive it of a power that
might one day be vital to the safety of the Union, and to exhibit it in
a condition of feebleness that was altogether incompatible with any
rational conception of a sovereign State. It is true that the Supreme
Court has changed not only its _personnel_, but its spirit, and its
whole attitude toward questions of public policy, since 1895. It has
more and more allowed the influence of the age and the necessities of
the times and the clear demands of social and economic justice to
moderate its decisions; and had the question of an income tax been
brought before it any time in the last five years, it would probably
have reversed its judgment of 1895. But President Taft was undoubtedly
right when he urged, in 1909, that the risk of another adverse decision
was too great to be run, and that the safer course was to proceed by
way of an amendment to the Constitution.

The mere passing of the Income Tax amendme