The transition we are witnessing is no equable transition of growth and normal alteration; no silent, unconscious unfolding of one age into another, its natural heir and successor. Society is looking itself over, in our day, from top to bottom; is making fresh and critical analysis of its very elements; is questioning its oldest practises as freely as its newest, scrutinizing every arrangement and motive of its life; and it stands ready to attempt nothing less than a radical reconstruction, which only frank and honest counsels and the forces of generous cooperation can hold back from becoming a revolution. We are in a temper to reconstruct economic society, as we were once in a temper to reconstruct political society, and political society may itself undergo a radical modification in the process. I doubt if any age was ever more conscious of its task or more unanimously desirous of radical and extended changes in its economic and political practise.
We stand in the presence of a revolution—not a bloody revolution, America is not given to the spilling of blood—but a silent revolution whereby America will insist upon recovering in practise those ideals which she has always professed, upon securing a government devoted to the general interest and not to special interests.
We are upon the eve of a great reconstruction. It calls for creative statesmanship as no age has done since that great age in which we set up the government under which we live, that government which was the admiration of the world until it suffered wrongs to grow up under it which have made many of our own compatriots question the freedom of our institutions and preach revolution against them. I do not fear revolution. I have unshaken faith in the power of America to keep its self-possession. Revolution will come in peaceful guise, as it came when we put aside the crude government of the Confederation, and created the great Federal Union which governed individuals, not States, and which has been these one hundred and thirty years our vehicle of progress. Some radical changes we must make in our law and practise. Some reconstructions we must push forward, which a new age and new circumstances impose upon us. But we can do it all in calm and sober fashion, like statesmen and patriots.
I do not speak of these things in apprehension, because all is open and above-board. This is not a day in which great forces rally in secret. The whole stupendous program must be publicly planned and canvassed. Good temper, the wisdom that comes of sober counsel, the energy of thoughtful and unselfish men, the habit of cooperation and of compromise which has been bred in us by long years of free government in which reason rather than passion has been made to prevail by the sheer virtue of candid and universal debate, will enable us to win through to still another great age without violence.
THE INCOME TAX IN AMERICA
THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION AMENDED A.D. 1913
JOSEPH A. HILL
During the year 1913 a most amazing event happened. The United States amended its Constitution by peaceful means. Indeed the Constitution was twice amended; for, having passed the sixteenth amendment in February, permitting an income tax, the States, just to show what they could do when aroused to it, passed the seventeenth amendment in May, authorizing the direct election of United States senators by the people.
Amending the United States Constitution is so difficult and cumbrous a proceeding, that it had not previously been accomplished for over a century, except by the throes of the terrible Civil War. The original Constitution had twelve amendments added to it before it was fully established in running order in 1804. The thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments were added after 1865 to prohibit slavery. They were forced upon the unwilling Southern States. From 1804 to 1913 no amendment was put through by the regular process. Yet in that time efforts to amend were made on over one hundred and forty occasions. Men had grown discouraged at last; they said that amendment was impossible. The cumbrous system which has thus so long blocked all change was that Congress must by a two-thirds vote in each House agree to submit an amendment to the States. These must then pass upon the new law, each in its own legislature. If three-fourths of the legislatures approved, the amendment was to be accepted. Few of the proposed changes ever won a two-thirds vote in both Congressional Houses; and of those few not one had ever appealed to the necessary overwhelming majority of State legislatures. The Senatorial amendment passed Congress several years ago, and had long been knocking rather hopelessly at legislative doors. Then the Income Tax amendment appeared. Congress passed it almost hurriedly in a spasm of progressiveness in 1909. Then came the great sweep of progressive policies to victory in the elections of 1912; and legislatures everywhere awoke to the universal insistence on the Income Tax. All the States but six approved the amendment; and one of the last acts of President Taft during his administration was to proclaim its adoption. The popular amendment swept along in its train the Senatorial change; and the latter, though still opposed by most of the old South, was ratified by all the rest of the States except Rhode Island and Utah. So it also became law.
Nothing illustrates better the "tyranny of the dead hand" in the United States than the history of the income tax. The Constitution laid it down that no head tax or other direct tax should be imposed except by apportioning it among the several States on the basis of their population. No more effective barrier to any system of direct taxation could possibly have been devised. It would seem clear that the main intention of this Constitutional provision was not merely to protect the people of the smaller States, but to force the United States Government to depend for its revenue upon indirect taxes. Such, at any rate, has been its effect. Legal ingenuity, however, can get round anything. The Supreme Court decided as long ago as 1789 that an income tax was not a direct tax, and need not, therefore, be apportioned among the States. During the Civil War, though not, curiously enough, until every other source of taxable wealth had pretty well run dry, an income tax was actually imposed by three separate Acts of Congress, the Act of 1864 levying a tax of 5 per cent. on all incomes between $600 and $5,000, and of 10 per cent. on all incomes above $5,000. The tax continued to be collected up to 1872, when it was repealed.