aggressions on person and property, the opportunity to do one's work and lead one's life to the best of one's ability, these are things in the order of natural phenomena, a part of the milieu, modifications of the common environment of man, and no more to be kept on sale in quantities to suit the purchaser than gravitation or the weather. Nevertheless if not values in themselves they are the indispensable conditions precedent of value in all other things and no sacrifice can be too great which is necessary to their continuance; put in peril they are among the causas vivendi for which we should be ready to risk life itself. It is undeniably the State which provides them, and if the State has the right to put any price upon them at all it is right in putting the highest possible price; if the fourth part of the value of imported merchandise then the whole value or any multiple of the whole. This is in fact the traditional plea of the oppressor from the beginning. By a fine anticipation of the contrat social the State has never failed to make the benefits it confers the pretext of its exactions, to explain its spoliations as the collection of a debt due for services rendered; an argument of course which strengthens with every improvement in the character of the government and the condition of the people. The more the State gives the more it is entitled to take; the right of greatest rapacity goes to the best government. So the enormous taxation of the United States since the war of the rebellion has been boldly ordered and patiently borne in the universal conviction that no price is too great to pay for the blessings of good government. But the truth is that the bless ings of government like the bounties of nature or providence are without money and without price; they can only be given away and not sold. Or rather as I said before they result in evitably from the very existence of the State and the necessi ties of its organic action.

The political title. therefore under which the State takes the tax upon the property of its subjects is other than the com. mercial title under which the property is acquired and exchanged; and only mischievous consequences in the practical order can follow the confounding of the two.

II. The sovereign rights of the State of whatever kind are the correlative of its functions; so far from being acquired by

the discharge of them that they are indispensable à priori to their exercise. Its specific functions are to give expression in the law and effect through the executive to the common purpose of the people united by common necessities and common dangers; in its name and behalf to overcome the intractable and reclaim the waste forces of nature, to repel the aggression of foreign powers, to punish and put down the malefactor; in general, to maintain throughout the realm the conditions of security and order essential to the well-being of all. If these things are proper and necessary, if the State has any sufficient reason of being, in other words if the people has the right to combine and arm in self-defense, then has the State ipso facto the right to all the material necessary for the creation of State power. Whatever service of person or tribute of money is required for its rightful purposes belongs to it under an original, and indisputable title, and is to be taken not by negotiation and according to contract but by force and according to law.

But this clearly is a title which carries its own limitation with it and the limitation is as essential to its integrity as the extension up to the limit. The right to the means necessary for a given end is without force and meaning or is exclusive of all right to what is not a means and not necessary. If the State taxes the subject for any purpose other than the specific purposes for which it exists, or beyond the amount requisite for those purposes, it takes what is not its own. Moreover what are these specific purposes for which the property of the subject is taken? They are in part the protection of the property not taken. To take more than it requires is to confiscate the very property it was set to guard, to add to the enemies of the commonwealth the most formidable and insidious of all, the power created to withstand them. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Therefore whatever is not required for the legitimate expenses of the State remains the property of the subject by a title as original and indisputable as the other; a title which however it may be violated cannot be extinguished by any utterance of law however formal or any will of the people however unanimous. To take a life not required for the defence of the State is murder, to take service not required for its business is slavery, and to take property not required for its

expenses is robbery; if the taking is knowing and intentional. The two titles are coördinate, exclusive of one another, and interdependent. As neither can be defined without a definition of the other, so neither can be subverted without subverting the other. For the State to invade the right of private property is to impair the sources of its revenue; for the subject to dispute the right of public property is to impair the only safeguard of his own; a double result perfectly secured by the sentimental compromise of the contrat social. What rightfully belongs to the State, then, is the cost of its services and not the value of them; so much of the wealth of the nation, and no more, as it requires to meet the liabilities incurred in the exercise of its functions.

There are first the ordi

These liabilities are of two kinds. nary kind for the current expenses of the government, calcu lated in advance for the fiscal year upon the basis of previous expenditure. Like any periodically recurring disbursement they might be stated as interest on a debt capital and this capi tal as a claim on the whole capital of the nation, making the State on the one hand in the proportion of its debt so stated and the subjects on the other each in the proportion of his private fortune, the joint-proprietors of the national wealth, the annual product of which is distributed partly as revenue to the State for payment of its expenses, partly as the revenue of the subjects for the uses of life and the enterprises of business. The objection to this form of statement is that it is a mere fiction of finance or book-keeping but with a dangerous sug. gestion of socialistic communism. The simple reality without artifice is that the current expenses of the government for whatever period calculated are a periodical charge upon the wealth of the nation. Now a periodical charge upon property of any kind is properly provided for out of the product or earnings of the property.

The liabilities of the extraordinary kind are those contracted in some sudden emergency of public affairs, a pestilence, or famine, or war, which precipitates the State into expenditure beyond its immediately available resources, and are provided for by a loan bearing interest until the date fixed for payment of the principal. This is debt actually capitalized and may be

properly stated as a claim to the amount of the principal on the capital wealth of the nation. Thus according to the January statement the interest-bearing debt of the United States is something under $13,000,000,000, and were it to mature and payment to be demanded to-morrow the government must either default or appropriate whatever amount of the capital wealth of the nation may be required to cover the deficiency of its assets. But in fact no State debt is ever so discharged or could be without ruin to the country. One of two things always happens; either the State arranges with its creditors. for the postponement of the date when the principal is due, or it applies the annual surplus of its current revenue over its current expenses to the reduction of the principal. In either case the debt figures in the estimates only as a liability of the ordinary kind, an item in the current expenditure whether as interest falling due or as surplus available for reduction of the principal. Thus along with the other current expenses it is a periodical charge upon the national wealth, not to be met by ruinous conversion of capital but by appropriating a given proportion of the uninvested product of capital. We may therefore define the property of the State to be so much of the annual product or revenue of the wealth of the nation as it requires for its legitimate annual expenses.

This proportion again of the whole product of the national wealth is made up of parts in the same proportion of the reve nues of all the subjects. If we suppose that the annual liabilities of the State are to the annual product of the wealth of the nation, say, in the ratio of 1 to 100, then one per centum of the annual revenue of each subject belongs to the State; no more and no less. No more, for to exceed the proportion of one per centum in any case is to increase the burden of one by lightening that of all the others; no less, for to fall short of it is to diminish the burden of one by increasing that of the others; in either case to go back on the line of political evolution to the unrighteous inequalities of class rule, to accord special privileges to one portion of the subjects and impose special sacrifices on the other. If the State in its estimates cannot exceed the sum-total required for its legitimate expenses, no more can it exceed in its taxation the uniform pro

portion due by each subject without violating the right of pr vate property and taking what is not its own.

For here is the very ground and reason of our separate and independent being as a State, the specific note of our system as the latest and highest product of political evolution. We rebelled from our original allegiance, in obedience certainly to many blind and hidden forces, but upon the public pretext that we would not submit to discriminating and disproportionate burdens; and the other day we suppressed another rebellion made to fasten the worst of such burdens on a subject race. From first to last and in every way in which a people can express its political consciousness we have declared that all usurpations of sovereign power and privilege by one man over other men, by one class over other classes, by one people over other peoples, are an outrage, not because an oppression of the weak, for the weak may deserve and require oppression, but because a punishment of the innocent. We have seized the sovereignty in the name of the people to put an end to all this and that hereafter in the consciousness of the State, in the eye of the law, and in the act of the executive only two classes shall be known forevermore, the law-abiding and the lawless, the subjects for whose benefit the State exists, whose rights are one and whose responsibilities are uniform, and they for whose repression it exists, whose rights are forfeited. This is the historical doctrine to which the American people is committed before all the world, which we are here to give public effect to, namely, that no man shall suffer in person or in property more than other men suffer unless he deserves to, that the only ground known to the State for the imposition of exceptional burdens is the ground of wrong doing. Were strict justice possible in this world, government would be wholly at the charge of those who make government necessary; it is the wrong-doer who should bear all the consequences of his wrong. doing. For example we were entirely right in the magnanimity which closed the war of the rebellion, but had other considerations not intervened we should have been entirely right in charging the enormous development of government which it precipitated to the rebellious population, as Germany, granting the righteousness of her cause, was right in taking in