Various
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, October 1899
The New York commission of 1870 proposed to limit the State taxes to a very few number of objects. That they be "levied on a comparatively broad basis – like real estate – with certainty, proportionality, and uniformity on a few items of property, like the franchises of all moneyed corporations enjoying the same privileges within the State, and on fixed and unvarying signs of property, like rental values of buildings" – such was the scheme proposed. The leading object to be attained was equality of burdens, and a second object of quite as great importance, was simplicity in assessment and collection. Granting that real estate, lands, and buildings were taxed on a full and fair market valuation, and that corporations contributed their share toward the expenses of the State, it remained to devise a tax that should reach all other forms of property that could be properly and easily assessed. This tax was to be known as the "building-occupancy" tax, and was to be levied on an additional assessment of a sum equal to three times the annual rent or rental value of all the buildings on the land.12 Nearly thirty years later the Massachusetts commission proposed a modified form of this tax. An annual rental value of four hundred dollars was to be exempt from taxation, but ten per cent was to be levied on all rental values in excess of that amount.
"The advantages of a tax on house rentals," said the commission, "can be easily stated. It is clear, almost impossible of evasion, easy of administration, well fitted to yield a revenue for local uses, and certain to yield such a revenue. It is clear, because the rental value of a house is comparatively easy to ascertain. The tax is based on a part of a man's affairs which he publishes to all the world. It requires no inquisition and no inquiry into private matters; it uses simply the evidence of a man's means which he already offers."13 If this tax were to be given it would be possible to wipe out all the tax on incomes from "profession, trade, or employment," to abolish the existing assessments on personal property. The effects would be far-reaching. If loans of money are free from taxation, the purchasing power of money in the same degree must diminish, which simply means that the purchasing power of farms and products of farms for money must to the same extent increase; hence, the borrower on bond and mortgage will not be subject to double taxation – first, in the form of increased rate of interest, and then in taxation of his real estate – and hence the farmer or landowner who is not in the habit of either lending or borrowing money will find his ability to meet additional taxation on his land increased in additional value of land and products of land in proportion as the tax is removed from money at interest. Also, the exemption of the products of farms and things consumed on farms from taxation will give a corresponding increased value to compensate for the "building-occupancy" tax. Tenants controlled by all-pervading natural laws can and will give increased rents, if their personal property is exempt primarily from taxation. The average profits of money at interest or of dealings in visible personal property free from taxation can not exceed, for any considerable length of time, the average profits of real estate, risk of investment and skill in management taken into consideration; and therefore the real pressure of taxation under the proposed system will finally be, like atmospheric pressure or pressure of water, on all sides, and by a natural uniform law executed upon all property in every form used and consumed in the State. Persons must occupy buildings and business must be done in buildings, and through these visible instrumentalities capital can be reached by a rule of fractional uniformity, and by a simple, plain, and economical method of assessment and collection.
This building-occupancy tax, or tax on rental value, does not preclude a supplementary tax on corporations.
Much has been said of the onerous burdens of taxation endured by individuals compared with those of corporations, and especially corporations enjoying certain rights or franchises in public streets and highways or corporations of a more or less public character. The phenomenal growth of municipalities has been one of the notable social movements of the last twenty-five years. The drift of population from the country districts to cities has increased with each year, and finds an explanation in many causes. The opportunities offered in a city for advancement are greater and more numerous; the monotony of the farm life does not keep the young at home, but drives them for excitement and profit to the great centers of population. The economic changes of a half century also have their influence. The competition of new regions, better adapted for certain cultures on a commercial scale, has reduced the profitableness of older and more settled localities, where comparatively costly methods must be resorted to if the fertility of the land is to be maintained. The wheat fields of the West narrowed the margin of profit in New England farming, while the sheep and cattle ranges of the West made it impossible for the same quality of live stock to be raised for profit in the East. Farms were abandoned, and the younger blood went West to grow up with the country, or into the cities to struggle for a living. Further, the advances in agriculture, the application of more productive methods, and the introduction of machinery have reduced the demand for labor in the rural districts, and this has led to a migration to the cities.
The result of this has been an immense development of city life, and with it an ever-increasing field for investment in corporate activities. The supply of water is usually in the city's control, but the manufacture and sale of gas, the production and distribution of electricity, the street railways, telegraph, and telephone interests are private corporations formed for profit and using more or less the public highways in the conduct of their various enterprises. A grant of a street or highway for a railway or electric-wire subway generally involves a monopoly of that use, and the privilege or franchise may become more valuable with the mere growth in the population of the cities. Assured against an immediate competition, there is a steady increment in the value of the franchise, and in the case of a true monopoly there seems to be no limits to its possible growth.
An instance of this nature is so striking in its relations and so pertinent to the present discussion that attention is asked to it. In the reign of James I water was supplied by two or three conduits in the principal streets of London, and the river and suburban springs were the sources of supply. Large buildings were furnished with water by tapping these conduits with leaden pipes, but other buildings and houses were supplied by "tankard bearers," who brought water daily. A jeweler of the city, Hugh Myddleton by name, believed something better could be done, and he proposed to bring water from Hertfordshire by a "new river." He embarked in the undertaking, sank his fortune in its conduct, and appealed to the king for assistance. James granted this aid, taking one half of the shares of the company – thirty-six out of the seventy-two shares into which it was divided. The shares that remained received the name of "adventurer's moiety." The work was completed in 1613, and water was then let into the city.
So little was the measure appreciated that its first years were troublous ones for the shareholders. The squires objected to the river, believing it would overflow their lands or reduce them to swamps and destroy the roads. The city residents adopted the use of the water slowly. The shares were nominally worth £100 apiece, but for nearly twenty years the income was only 12s., or $3, per share. In 1736 a share was valued at £115 10s., and by 1800 it had risen to £431 8s. With the first years of this century the company prospered, and its benefits were widely applied, reflecting this change in the value of its capital. In 1820 a share was worth £11,500 and in 1878 the fraction of a share was sold at a rate which made a full share worth £91,000. In 1888 the dividend distributed to each share was £2,610. Eleven years later, in July, 1889, a single share was sold for £122,800, or nearly $600,000. The nominal capital of the company in 1884 was £3,369,000, and besides its water franchise it holds large estates and valuable properties. While the actual real estate controlled by the corporation accounts for some of this remarkable rise in the value of the shares, a greater and more lasting cause was the possession of an almost exclusive privilege or franchise which assured a handsome and ever-increasing return on the investment. Had all the other property been deducted from the statement of the company's assets, there would have remained this intangible and immeasurable right created and conceded by its charter and long usance.
A definition of a franchise has been given by the Supreme Court in terms of sufficient general accuracy to be adopted: "A franchise is a right, privilege, or power of public concern which ought not to be exercised by private individuals at their mere will and pleasure, but which should be reserved for public control and administration, either by the Government directly or by public agents acting under such conditions and regulations as the Government may impose in the public interest and for the public security."14 A necessary condition, then, is a public interest in the occupation or privileges to be followed. The good will of a person or individual trader is not a franchise in this sense, though a franchise may be enjoyed by an individual as well as by a corporation, and good will may rest upon the privilege implied in the franchise.
The recognition of franchises, a species of property "as invisible and intangible as the soul in a man's body," as a proper object for taxation is now beyond any dispute. It is peculiarly appropriate as a source of revenue for the exclusive use of the State, inasmuch as the grant of franchises emanates from the State in its sovereign capacity. In the case of Morgan vs. the State of Louisiana, Justice Field, of the Supreme Court of the United States, said: "The franchises of a railroad corporation are rights or privileges which are essential to the operation of the corporation and without which its roads and works would be of little value, such as the franchise to run cars, to take tolls, to appropriate earth and gravel for the bed of its road, or water for its engines, and the like. They are positive rights or privileges, without the possession of which the road or company could not be successfully worked. Immunity from taxation is not one of them."15 Further, the extent to which this taxation of franchises may be carried rests entirely in the discretion of the taxing power, subject only to constitutional restrictions.
The great difficulty in applying such a tax lies in the methods of reaching an understanding on the value of the franchise. How can this indefinite something be made visible on the tax books? In many instances the franchise may be regarded as inseparable from the real property of the corporation. The rails of a tramway, the poles and wires of a telegraph company, the pipes and conduits of a gas company, are real and tangible things, necessary to a proper conduct to the respective functions of the corporations. But the right to lay tracks in the public streets, to sink pipes under the streets, or to string wires overhead is as necessary a possession and as essential to the performance of what the corporation was created to accomplish. Whether this permits the franchise to be regarded as "real estate" and so offers it for taxation is a question of some theoretical interest, but of little practical importance.16 Unless the franchise is regarded in this way, as belonging to real estate, or as forming a taxable entity apart from other property, it would be simpler to reach it through a corporation tax in one of the many ways open for applying that tax.
Enough has been said to demonstrate the extremely faulty condition of tax methods in the United States. Uniformity is highly desirable, but equality of burden is even more to be desired. The advances in this direction have been few, and accomplished only partially in a few States. The machinery for making assessments is only a part of the problem, as the intention of the law, the spirit of the act, is of even higher importance in securing justice and moderation. If these essays, incomplete as they must of necessity be, have led to a better comprehension of the chaotic condition existing now and of the difficulties to be overcome, their object will have been attained. The remedy may be left for time to effect.
In connection with the celebration of the centenary of the death of the naturalist Lazaro Spallanzani, at Reggio, Italy, in February last, a booklet has been published containing articles on various aspects of the life and work of Spallanzani and matters associated with him. Among the authors represented are Mantegazza, Ferrari, and others well known in Italian science.
BACON'S IDOLS: A COMMENTARY
By WILLIAM HENRY HUDSON, PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY
In the first book of the Novum Organon the great leader of the new philosophy undertook to set forth the dangers and difficulties which stand always in the way of clear and fruitful thought. Conscious that he was breaking entirely with the schools of the past, and ambitious of laying the firm foundations on which all future inquirers would have to build, it was natural that Bacon should pause on the threshold of his vast enterprise to take stock of the mental weaknesses which had rendered futile the labors of earlier thinkers, and which, if not carefully guarded against, would jeopardize the efforts of times to come. That the understanding may direct itself effectively to the search for truth it is necessary, he insisted, that it should have a full apprehension of the lapses to which it is ever liable, the obstacles with which it will constantly have to contend. A vague sense of peril is not enough. As a first condition of healthy intellectual activity we must learn to know our frailties for what they really are, estimate their consequences, and probe the secrets of their power.
Bacon's statement of the sources of error and vain philosophizing is regarded by him as merely the pars destruens or negative portion of his work – as it were, "the clearing of the threshing floor." But his aphorisms are packed close with solid and substantial thought, and well deserve the attention of all who would seriously devote themselves to the intellectual life. "True philosophy," as he conceived it, "is that which is the faithful echo of the voice of the world, which is written in some sort under the direction of things, which adds nothing of itself, which is only the rebound, the reflection of reality." To reach for ourselves, as nearly as we may, a philosophy which shall meet the terms of this exigent definition is, or should be, one chief purpose of our study and our thought. We may very well ask, then, what help so great and suggestive a thinker may give us on our way.
With his characteristic fondness for fanciful phraseology, Bacon describes the causes which distort our mental vision as Idola– idols or phantoms of the mind.17 Of such he distinguishes four classes, which he calls, respectively: Idols of the Tribe (Idola Tribus); Idols of the Cave (Idola Specus); Idols of the Market Place (Idola Fori); and Idols of the Theater (Idola Theatri). It is not to be claimed for Bacon's analysis that it is exhaustive or always scientifically exact. In many places, too, it opens up difficult philosophic questions, which for the present must be disregarded. But, as Professor Fowler has said, there is something about his diction, "his quaintness of expression, and his power of illustration which lays hold of the mind and lodges itself in the memory in a way which we can hardly find paralleled in any other writer, except it be Shakespeare."18 Moreover, though he often deals with matters of merely technical and temporary interest, his leading thoughts are of permanent and universal applicability. Let us see, then, what suggestions we can gather from a brief consideration of his Idols, one by one.
Idols of the Tribe are so called because they "have their foundation in human nature itself"; in other words, they are the prepossessions and proclivities which belong to men as men, and as such are common to the whole race or tribe. "Let men please themselves as they will," says Bacon, "in admiring and almost adoring the human mind, this is certain: that as an uneven mirror distorts the rays of objects according to its own figure and section, so the mind, when it receives impressions of objects through the sense, can not be trusted to report them truly, but in forming its notions mixes up its own nature with the nature of things." In many lines of thought there is no more pregnant source of fallacy and confusion than the tendency, innate in all and seldom properly checked, to accept man as the measure of all things, and to translate the entire universe into terms of our own lives. Theology, though it is slowly outgrowing its cruder anthropomorphism, still talks about the "will" of God, an "intelligent" First Cause, the "moral governor," and "lawgiver"; and outside theology we have ample evidence of the persistency with which we humanize and personify Nature by endowing it with attributes belonging to ourselves. Darwin confessed that he found it difficult to avoid this tendency.19 It is a pitfall into which men constantly stumble in their attempts to interpret the processes at work about them.
One important result of our habit of thus forcing the universe to become "the bond-slave of human thought" is to be found, as Bacon notes, in our proneness to "suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world" than is actually to be discovered there. While we read design and purpose into the phenomena of Nature because we are conscious of design and purpose in our own activities, thus allowing ourselves to drift into the metaphysical doctrine of Final Causes, we also do our best to bring Nature's multitudinous operations into such definite formulas as will satisfy our love of plan and symmetry. We are not content till we can systematize and digest, whence our continual recourse to loose analogies and fanciful resemblances. We start from an imagined necessity of order, or from some conception of things attractive because of its apparent simplicity, and then reason out from this into the facts of Nature. Mill furnishes some telling examples. "As late as the Copernican controversy it was urged, as an argument in favor of the true theory of the solar system, that it placed the fire, the noblest element, in the center of the universe. This was a remnant of the notion that the order of the universe must be perfect, and that perfection consisted in conformity to rules of procedure, either real or conventional. Again, reverting to numbers, certain numbers were perfect, therefore these numbers must obtain in the great phenomena of Nature. Six was a perfect number – that is, equal to the sum of all its factors – an additional reason why there must be exactly six planets. The Pythagoreans, on the other hand, attributed perfection to the number ten, but agreed in thinking that the perfect numbers must be somehow realized in the heavens; and knowing only of nine heavenly bodies to make up the enumeration, they asserted 'that there was an antichthon, or counter-earth, on the other side of the sun, invisible to us.' Even Huygens was persuaded that when the number of heavenly bodies had reached twelve it could not admit of any further increase. Creative power could not go beyond that sacred number."20 Do these concrete illustrations of perverse reasoning strike us as ludicrous? It is because they are taken from an order of ideas long since outgrown. The tendencies they exemplify have not been outgrown. We have only to keep a vigilant eye on our own mental conduct to be convinced that we are very apt to begin with some general notion of "the fitness of things," or what "ought to be," and to argue thence to conclusions not a whit less absurd essentially than those just referred to.
While these universal mental habits are conspicuous enough in the higher regions of thought and begin to play tricks with us the moment we undertake on our own accounts any serious speculation, there are other Idols of the Tribe whose influence is perhaps more commonly fatal. We all jump at conclusions, the mind feigning and supposing "all other things to be somehow, though it can not see how, similar to those few things by which it is surrounded"; we all allow ourselves to be unduly "moved by those things most which strike and enter the mind simultaneously and suddenly, and so fill the imagination." Hasty judgments are thus daily and hourly passed on men and things, and rash generalizations permitted to circulate untested. Even more disastrous, perhaps, in the long run, is the power of prepossessions. When once, says Bacon, the human understanding has "adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion, or as being agreeable to itself)" it straightway "draws all things else to support and agree with it." Illustrations may be found in every direction. Note, for instance, the vitality, even in the teeth of positive disproof, of many long-accepted and often-challenged ideas – belief in dreams, omens, prophecies, in providential visitations and interpositions, in the significance of coincidences, in popular saws about natural phenomena, in quacks and quackery, in old wives' tales, vulgar and pseudo-scientific. The story of witchcraft is only another example of the same kind, though written large in the chronicles of the world in letters of fire and blood; the human understanding had "adopted" a belief in witches, and drew "all things else to support and agree with it." In all such cases of prepossession the mind obstinately dwells on every detail that favors its accepted conclusions, while disregarding or depreciating everything that tells against them; it is always, in Bacon's phrase, "more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives." Thus, we hear much of the one dream that is fulfilled, and of the ninety and nine that are unfulfilled – nothing. Bacon illustrates this perversity by the well-known anecdote of the ancient cynic, which may be left to convey its own moral: "And therefore it was a good answer that was made by one who, when they showed him hanging in a temple a picture of those who had paid their vows as having escaped shipwreck, and would have him say whether he did not now acknowledge the power of the gods – 'Ay,' asked he again, 'but where are they painted that were drowned after their vows?'"
Finally, among these Idols of the Tribe we must include the disturbance caused by the play of feeling upon the mind. "The human understanding is no dry light, but receives an infusion from the will and affections, whence proceed sciences which may be called 'sciences as one would.'" We all know, to our cost, how passion will warp judgment; how difficult it is to see clearly when the emotions are thoroughly aroused; how tenaciously men cling to opinions they are familiar with, or would fain have to be true; how fiercely they contest ideas that are unfamiliar or repugnant. Had it been contrary to the interest of authority, observed shrewd old Hobbes, that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square, the fact would have been, if not disputed, yet suppressed.21 Similarly, if the passions of men had been called into play over the most clearly demonstrable of abstract mathematical truths, we may be sure that furious controversy would have attended the issue, and some way found to overthrow the demonstration. That two and two make four would have been denied had any strong emotion been excited against the proposition. "Men," said Whateley, "are much more anxious to have truth on their side than to be on the side of truth." And the danger is greater because we are frequently not aware of the bias given by feeling. There are cases in plenty where men more or less consciously and deliberately espouse "sciences as one would," but there are many others in which the emotional interference is insidious and obscure. "Numberless, in short, are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the feelings color and infect the understanding."
These Idols of the Tribe are of course inherent in our intellectual constitution, and are ineradicable. The simple consideration that all knowledge is relative – that by no effort and under no circumstances can we escape beyond the conditions and limitations of our own minds – suffices to show that intelligence must ever mix up its own nature with the nature of things, though this fact need not make us doubt the validity of knowledge as is sometimes hastily inferred. For the rest, clear recognition of these common obstacles to thought should put us in the way of anticipating and withstanding their more serious effects. In practice it must be our object to maintain watchfulness and a careful skepticism; to test evidence and check passion; to cultivate candor, flexibility, and alertness of mind; to avoid loose generalizations; and to be ever ready to accept, revise, reject. Above all must we steadily resist the seductions of what is called common sense, and overcome that mental inertness which too often leads us to drift unthinking along the current of popular opinion.22
But, in addition to errors arising from the common intellectual nature of men, there are others, the sources of which are to be found in the idiosyncrasies of the individual mind. These Bacon calls Idols of the Cave;23 for every one, he says, "has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and discolors the light of Nature, owing either to his own proper and peculiar nature; or to his education and conversation with others; or to his reading of books, and the authority of those whom he esteems and admires; or to the differences of impressions, accordingly as they take place in a mind preoccupied and predisposed, or in a mind indifferent and settled; and the like." This summary is comprehensive enough to indicate the character and point to some of the causes of individual aberrations of judgment; that it does no more than this is due to the simple fact that the personal bias is as varied as humanity itself, and that the deflecting impulses in any given case are to be referred to a complex of factors almost eluding analysis. To follow this part of the subject into detail would, therefore, manifestly be impossible. But certain of the larger and more widely influential of these disturbing forces may be roughly marked out by way of illustration.
In the first place, there is what we may call the professional bias. Exclusive devotion to separate lines of activity, study, or thought inevitably gives the mind a particular set or twist. Bacon complains that Aristotle, primarily a logician, made his natural philosophy the slave of his logic. Few specialists can escape the insulation consequent upon living too continuously in a confined area of problems and ideas. Their intellectual outlook is necessarily circumscribed, facts are seen by them out of proper perspective, and one-sidedness of training and discipline renders their judgment of things partial and incomplete. The lawyer carries his legal, the theologian his theological, the scientist his scientific bent of mind into every inquiry; with what grotesque results is only too frequently apparent. Accustomed to move in a single narrow groove, and wholly absorbed in the contemplation of certain isolated classes of phenomena, they unconsciously allow their particular interests to dominate their thought, and impose disastrous restrictions upon their view of whatever lies outside their own chosen field.
Secondly, we have the bias of nation, rank, party, sect. Here the mental disturbances are too numerous to permit and too obvious to require special exemplification. Intellectual provincialism of any kind is fatal to large and fertile thought, alike by limiting the range of our knowledge and sympathies and by inducing mental habits and implanting prejudices which prevent us from seeing things in wide relations and under a clear light. So long as our point of view is simply that of our country, our class, our party, or our church, so long, it is evident, our minds will lack the breadth and flexibility necessary for free inquiry, fruitful comparisons, sane and balanced judgments.24
Finally, among the Idols of the Cave "which have most effect in disturbing the clearness of the understanding," mention must be made of the temperamental bias. Every man, it has been said, is born Platonist or Aristotelian; it is certain that the great divisions in thought – religious, philosophical, political – answer roughly to fundamental differences in human nature, and that every one not checked or turned aside by extraneous influences will spontaneously gravitate in one or another direction. Bacon is only recording a fact of the commonest experience when he says that "there are found some minds given to an extreme admiration of antiquity, others to an extreme love and appetite for novelty, but few so duly tempered that they can hold the mean, neither carping at what has been well laid down by the ancients nor despising what is well introduced by the moderns." Many instinctively brace themselves against authority and tradition; by others again, whatever is handed down to us by authority and tradition is for this reason alone treated with contempt. That the crowd believes a thing is enough to convince this man of its truth, and that of its falsehood.