things no longer exists; for in the brief submitted to, and in the argument made before the United States Supreme Court adverse to the constitutionality of the provisions of the income-tax enactment of August, 1894, by Hon. Clarence A. Seward, a department of national history which no historian or jurist had ever before completely exploited, was so traversed by him that it is difficult to see how any one can acquaint himself with its results and doubt that, although the framers of the Constitution and the people they represented might not fully agree as to a full and comprehensive definition of a direct tax, there was apparently a perfect unanimity of opinion among them that an income tax was a typical example of that kind of taxation.
Previous to the adoption of the Constitution there were no Federal taxes, and all precedents for helping to a correct determination of the constitutional meaning of direct taxation must therefore be drawn from the prior experience of the several States.
What was that experience? Recent historical research shows that Massachusetts had taxed incomes for more than a hundred years prior to the assembling of the Constitutional Convention; other of the leading States were imposing like taxes at or about 1787, and the receipts therefrom were used to help pay the quotas demanded by the then Government of the Confederation for the maintenance of the Federal Government. The income tax so paid, and all the other internal taxes collected by the States, were known as and called direct taxes and are so called to-day.
The Constitutional Convention empowered Congress to levy any of the authorized forms of taxation on the States; but the levy of direct taxes was guarded by a provision that such taxes should be apportioned to the population. The explanation of this curious anomaly is that the consensus of opinion in the convention was that wealth at that period was so equitably divided among the people of the States that population was the best measure of wealth and consequently of equitable taxation. But what would become of the element of equality if the levy was in the form of indirect taxes—duties, imposts, and excises—which, falling on the consumption of tea, coffee, sugar, spirits, and the like, leave it optional with the citizen in a great degree whether he will pay or not? Hamilton certainly thought that the door had been effectually closed against the possibility of any such evasion, for, when speaking of direct taxes in The Federalist, he says: "An actual census or enumeration of the people must furnish the rule; a circumstance which effectually shuts the door to partiality or evasion."
But any doubt on this subject ought no longer to be tolerated, for we now have, almost for the first time, a definition of or distinc-
