minority as well as the majority in Pullman's Palace Car Co. v.
Pennsylvania,[1] in which attention was fixed almost exclusively on
the question whether the cars had a taxable situs in the state.
In Adams Express Co. v. Ohio State Auditor,[2] however, the matter
was more fully threshed out. This case sustained Ohio's applica-
tion of the unit rule to the taxation of interstate express companies.
The real estate of these companies was separately appraised, and
this appraised value was deducted from the assessment of the
company's "entire property" within the state. The statute set
forth no explicit instructions for the appraisal of this "entire prop-
erty," but the companies were required to report the value of their
total capital stock, their entire gross receipts, their gross receipts
from business done in Ohio, and the length of the lines of rail and
water routes over which they did business in Ohio and elsewhere.
From this and other data the board was to "arrive at the true value
in money of the entire property of said companies within the State
of Ohio, in the proportion which the same bears to the entire prop-
erty of said company, as determined by the value of the capital
stock thereof, and the other evidence and rules as aforesaid."[3]
For the most accurate statement of what the board did we must
go to the brief of Mr. Maxwell in behalf of the companies:
" . . . it is manifest that what the board did . . . was not to assess the defendants on the basis of the market value of such of their tangible property as was found within the State of Ohio, and on their moneys and credits within the State, but to treat the companies as owning dividend producing plants, whose value is represented by the market value of their shares, and to assign a portion of that value to the State of Ohio, as being property subject to taxation in that State. The basis of apportionment
- ↑ Note 33, supra.
- ↑ 165 U. S. 194, 17 Sup. Ct. Rep. 305 (1897).
- ↑ Ibid., 194, 197.
future possible earnings again depend to a great extent upon the skill with which the affairs of the company may be managed. These considerations, while they may enhance the value of the shares in the market, yet do not in fact increase the value of the actual property itself. . . . We must therefore take the property that actually was transferred and determine its value in some other way than by this resort to the market price of the stock" (pages 154-56). It should be noted that a year before this opinion was rendered, the court 'had forsaken the notion that these state taxes measured by the unit rule were imposed on tangible property alone, and had announced the doctrine that it was the intangible property of the company that was thus being valued.
