or its product. For example, there is nothing compulsory or unequal in an ordinary license tax. If the license is high, no one is compelled to engage in a business covered by its legal requirement; and few persons will until the average profits of the taxed business by the regular laws of competition finally reach the average profits of other like employments or investments. A tax on commodities like whisky, tobacco, fermented liquors, oleomargarine, playing cards, dice, and the like, can always be avoided as a primary tax, or can be paid at discretion. But there is nothing voluntary in the payment of a tax upon all real or personal property, or on the income of such property. Human beings can not subsist without some forms of personal property, and therefore a tax upon all personal property or its income is of necessity compulsory and not voluntary. Any general assessments of personal property on or by reason of its income, as well as assessments on real estate, are unavoidable in their nature, and therefore, from a philosophic or economic point of view, are typically direct taxes. (See Alexander Hamilton's brief in the Carriage case, Hamilton's Works, vol. vii, p. 848.)
The presence or absence of the principle of compulsion as constituting the essential difference between a direct and an indirect tax has not, it is believed, been before recognized by economists. And yet it is clearly involved or comprised in the definitions given by acknowledged authorities on the subject. Thus M. Leroy Beaulieu, in his Traité de la Science des Finances, characterizes those taxes "as direct which the legislator intends should be paid at once and immediately by him who bears their burden. They strike at once his fortune or his revenue, and every intermediary between him and the treasury is suppressed." McCulloch (Principles of Taxation) describes a tax "to be direct when it is immediately taken from property," and indirect "when it is taken from its owners by making them pay for liberty to use certain articles or exercise certain privileges." M. Say defines a direct tax to be the "absolute demand of a specific portion of an individual's real or supposed revenue." (Political Economy, p. 461.)
In the assessment of direct taxes a proportionality is generally sought between the person who pays and the value of his property, or ability to pay. Thus, in the taxation of watches, which are popular subjects for direct taxation, the proportionality between the owner who pays and the amount of property rated is recognized and maintained, by imposing, as in the city of Philadelphia, a tax of one dollar on watches of gold and one of seventy-five cents on watches of silver. In the assessment of indirect taxes the maintenance of any proportionality between the taxpayer and his fortune is not regarded. The idea of a personal assessment, which is characteristic of direct taxes, furthermore
