ors (Hill vs. Crosby, 26 Howard, par. 413). It would seem that business, occasional, transient, or permanent, transacted in a State by a resident or nonresident, by the force of State sovereignty, may be made subject to a uniform rule of taxation.
Extraterritorial taxation can have no force in American jurisprudence. Protection and taxation are correlative terms. Protection to that portion of property not taken or absorbed by the tax is the consideration or compensation for all legitimate taxation, and extraterritorial taxation is therefore a mere arbitrary "taking of private property without due process of law." When property is not protected by the law of a country or of a State and beyond the process of its courts, there can be no power to tax it (this principle is manifestly as applicable to business as to property—Rice vs. the United States, 4 Wheaton 246). In the foreign-held bond case, 15 Wallace 319, the United States Supreme Court said that "property lying beyond the jurisdiction of the State is not a subject upon which her taxing power can be legitimately exercised. Indeed, it would seem that no adjudication should be necessary to establish so obvious a proposition. The power of taxation, however vast in its character and searching in its extent, is necessarily limited to subjects within the jurisdiction of the State. These subjects are persons, property, and business."
These admitted facts and the opinions cited indicate that Connecticut is endeavoring in this case to enforce an extraterritorial tax on extraterritorial business, and a further consideration of the subject might here be dismissed, but a more detailed examination may show more clearly the unconstitutionality of this arbitrary exaction.Effect of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States in Respect to the Arbitrary Appropriation of Property by Taxation or Otherwise.—Another point preliminary to reform, and in respect to which it is important that there should be a clear understanding on the part of the people, is that there is a broad and philosophical distinction between "taxation" and "arbitrary" taking. It is often assumed that a State, because of its sovereignty, may, through form of law and delegated authority, deal with the persons and property of its subjects as it may see fit; and, repugnant as this assumption is to the principles which are assumed to constitute the foundation of all free government, it is not to be denied that previous to the adoption of the fourteenth amendment of the Constitution of the United States in 1868, it would be difficult to show that restraint existed upon the complete sovereignty of the States of the Federal Union over persons and property within their unquestioned jurisdiction; the right to hold a certain class of their population in slavery, and the right to take private property for public purposes without making any compensation, being illustrative of the exercise of such arbitrary powers in the utmost extreme. But since the decision of the United States Court in the Kirtland case, the same court has for the first time given a decided opinion on this subject, unmistakably as follows: "There is no such thing in the theory of our Government—State or national—as unlimited power in any of these branches. The executive, the legislative, and the judicial departments are all of limited and defined powers. There are limitations of power which arise out of the essential nature of all free governments, implied reservations of
