or imagination sustains him in considering to be that which justly represents the personal estate of the taxpayer.[1]
In view of the fact (made certain by all experience) that very few returns of personal property, even when supported by oaths, are worthy of implicit credence, the position of the assessor who honestly desires to enforce the law is one of great difficulty and embarrassment. For, in the absence of some superhuman power which will permit that to be seen which to ordinary vision is invisible, and to know what, through the exercise of ordinary reason, can not be known, any attempt on his part to obtain independent cognizance of such commercial and financial instrumentalities for the purpose of valuation and assessment is, on its face, an impossibility; and if the co-operation of the person to be assessed is to be invited or relied on, two of the most powerful influences that can control human action—love of gain, or the unwillingness to part with property, and the desire to avoid publicity in respect to one's private affairs—immediately unite to oppose and prevent such co-operation.
A resort to personal inquisition, with the accompanying machinery of oaths, "dooming," and penalties, is next in order; under which the State, ignoring all rules enacted for the protection of debtors in the ordinary collection of debts, pursues the citizen for the collection of what it claims to be a debt, with no better result, in nine cases out of ten, than the impairment of the public sense of both justice and morality.
But it is claimed that each individual owes the State annually a certain sum of money in the way of taxes, proportioned to his entire property. If he voluntarily pays, he escapes arbitrary measures. If he declines to pay, or tries to avoid payment, he has no just cause to complain if he is regarded in the light of a criminal, or if the same arbitrary measures are used to collect his tax as if it were a debt owing by one citizen to another. Let us examine this averment.
If the defaulting taxpayer is to be regarded as a criminal, and
- ↑ "In a case involving the assessment of personal property, in one of the courts of this State a few years ago, an assessor in one of our cities testified that his method of ascertaining what personal property a taxpayer owned was to examine the directories, the county clerk's office, and papers relative to estates of deceased persons; and when he lacked definite information, to guess at the assessment from the place of business or of residence occupied by the taxpayer. If the tax was cheerfully paid for two or three years, the personal assessment would then be ‘marked up.’ This process of increasing the personal assessment went on until, as the witness graphically said, the taxpayer ‘squealed,’ when the amount was finally fixed at what the taxpayer would bear without swearing it off."—Address on the Taxation of Personal Property, by Julien T. Davies, before the Manhattan Single Tax Club, January, 1891, New York.
