128 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. U. S. 625. The case under discussion would appear, however, to be the first in which a contention has been clearly made and carried up to the Supreme Court of the United States, that such a tax was obnoxious to the Fourteenth Amendment of the Federal Constitution. The appellants apparently despaired of convincing the court that the tax would deprive them of their property without due process of law, but insisted that it was in conflict with the clause forbidding the States to deny to any citizen the equal protection of the laws. The court, in an extremely well written opinion by Mr. Justice McKenna, returns the answer that might have been expected. The phrase " equal protection of the laws " is so evi- dently intended to be indefinite that the court has never attempted to fix its meaning. They have often declared, however, that almost no classifi- cation of persons for purposes of taxation can be held to interfere with this provision of the Constitution, so long as all within a class are treated alike. Only a discrimination obviously based on grounds wholly foreign to the proper ends of government could be held unconstitutional. In the Illinois Inheritance Tax Law, as in all other similar laws, there is a classi- fication which seriously affects the operation of the tax ; the division de- pending in the first place on the degree of relationship of the legatee to the testator, and secondly, on the amount of the legacy. The division rests in the first case on obvious natural grounds, and in the second case on economic principles long recognized in the tax laws of every country. This decision of the Supreme Court, it may be hoped, will finally settle the validity of all such laws under the Federal Constitution ; while the line of reasoning pursued in the opinion may tend to dissuade State courts from a narrow construction of restraints imposed by State constitutions upon the power of taxation. Charitable Institutions and the Rule of Respondeat Superior. — In carrying on the fiinctions of government, it is often needful to dele- gate to boards of individuals some portion of the governmental power. Such boards, in the absence of personal neglect, are not answerable for the faults of the servants they officially employ. The reason given is that the servants also become agents of the government. Non-governmental corporations engaged in rendering gratuitous services to the public, in view of their essentially public character, were at first regarded as falling under the class of governmental boards. Holiday v. St. Leonards, 1 1 C. B. N. s. 192. Later cases, however, notably Mersey Docks Trustees v. Gibhs et al.^ 11 H. L. 686, have settled the law for England that only corporations with strictly governmental powers are to be exempt from this liability. American courts have generally held that charitable corpora- tions were not liable. The first cases followed Holiday v. St. Leonards, supra, and treated charitable corporations as governmental corporations. But the reasoning of the later English cases soon led them to abandon this position, and they now base their decisions on the ground of a dis- tinct exception to the rule of respondeat superior. Hearns v. Waterbury Hospital, 66 Ct. 98. See 9 Harvard Law Review, 541. The last case on the point is Ward v. St. Vincent's Hospital, 52 N. Y. Sup. 466. Here the corporation was a public charitable institution, which did no business for profit, and which devoted the sums received from the patients who wished to pay, to the current expenses. The plaintiff was a pay patient, and was severely burned through the negligence of a nurse. The court
