thin air; for the notes go to the kitchen stove, and the new Constitution made no provision for taxing the ashes.
"Charles Young takes a pig in payment for his paper—like for like. Being a Jew, Mr. Young has conscientious scruples against eating pork, so he sells his pig to a butcher, taking his note. The butcher, finding the animal more than usually intelligent, thinks it would be wrong to hide the light of its political sagacity under a bushel of salt, and sells it alive to Clitus Barbour to represent that statesman, who helped to launch the new Constitution. Clitus gives his note for the pig. Becoming jealous of its rivalry, he sells it to Governor Kearney (taking his note), whose parlor it graces for a season, but, being detected in an indiscretion, the Governor sells it to General Howard, who gives his note. General Howard wants this pig to write letters favoring the new Constitution; but, as it scorns to prostitute its intellect that way, its less scrupulous owner parts with it to the congregation of Metropolitan Temple, whose pulpit it now fills, they giving their note and a benediction.
"The foregoing pig is now represented by five promissory notes and a benediction not taxed. None of these notes bear interest, nor are they of any benefit to their holders except as they may enable them, at a stated time, to get something of the same value as something previously renounced. The various notes make a trail of papers like that left by the ‘hare’ in the boys' game of ‘hare and hounds.’ Now comes the assessor under the new Constitution, and, in obedience to a righteous provision taxing property used for religious purposes, assesses that porker in the bosom of the church. Then he strikes the paper trail extending out through secular spaces into an editorial office, and, having assessed the grunter where it is, he again assesses it where it was last, and again where it was the time before, and so on through the whole series, until that not very valuable flitch of bacon, which has ‘dragged at each remove a lengthening chain’ of ‘solvent credits,’ has been the innocent cause of six payments into the State treasury. Beyond Mr. Young the assessor does not trouble himself to go, for on the ranch of a granger who is so intelligent as to exchange pigs for his papers the pachyderm's trail consists of tracks in the mud, and these the new Constitution neglected to declare to be property."Money Property.—But, after all, says some objector, "notwithstanding your many and plausible arguments—your statement that all the world except the United States have done away with the old, atomic, inquisitorial system of taxation—I do not like your proposed reforms, and for the reason mainly that they exempt ‘money property!’" It is most important, therefore, to inquire what is "money property," and also its relations to local taxation.
All capital or property is accumulated labor, labor being the source of all property. Hence any attempt to excite prejudice against capital or property, or to attack either, is an attack upon labor itself.
"Moneyed property" is generally understood to mean evidences of debt, which are not in a strict sense property; but rights to property, or assignments of property, according to the amount of interest of the creditor.
