Newer Tendencies in American Taxation

or a tax on the thing apart from the person. It is significant that taxation has generally begun as a specific or real tax and that it, developed into a personal tax. In New England, for instance, the earliest taxes were on particular things, like sheep and cows and houses and stock in trade; and only at a much later period do we find the general property tax, where the tax is imposed upon the individual with respect to his entire property, whether that property consists in things or in simple relations. For one reason or another, however, which it is not necessary to emphasize here, this personal tax everywhere turned out to be a failure; and step by step during the nineteenth century in Europe and more recently in some of our advanced American commonwealths the personal tax is again giving way to the real tax, the tax on things, the specific tax. So in France, it will be remembered, when the personal taxes were abolished in the revolution they were replaced during the whole of the nineteenth century by the specific taxes, a tax on land, a tax