Part 11

Regarding the number of hours of mental application per day which may be safely expected of a pupil in school, investigations have tended to show that there is a danger of requiring too many. When pupils return to school morning after morning without having recovered from the previous day's labors, it is evident that too heavy draughts are being made upon their nervous capital. It may be said in reply that many factors conspire to produce this depleted condition, as insufficient sleep, inadequate nutrition, and outside duties; but the answer is that under such unfavorable circumstances less work may be demanded. As the curriculum is planned in many places, alike in graded and ungraded schools, the pupil is expected to be employed in the school for five or six hours a day no matter what may be his age, and to this work should be added studies at home for the older students. Now, as Kraeplin[47] has justly observed, Nature ordains that a young child should not give six hours' daily concentrated attention in the schoolroom, but, rather, she has taken pains to implant deeply within him a profound instinct to preserve his mental health by refusing to attend to hard work for such a long period. Consequently, in such an educational _régime_, the mind of the pupil continually wanders from the duties in hand. The most serious aspect of this is apparent, that when attention is constantly demanded and not given, or when a pupil is pretending or attempting to keep his thoughts turned in a given direction, yet allows them to drift aimlessly because he is practically unable to control them, he is acquiring an unfortunate habit of mental dissipation. It seems certain that healthful and efficient mental activity requires that a child apply himself in a maximum degree for a relatively short period, the duration differing with the age of the individual and the balance of nervous energy to his credit; and then he should relax, attention being released for a time.

[Footnote 47: A Measure of Mental Capacity, Popular Science Monthly, vol. xlix, p. 758.]

Experiments conducted by Burgerstein[48] and at Leland Stanford Junior University[49] emphasize a particular phase of this principle--that too long continued mental application without relaxation induces fatigue more readily than when there are comparatively short periods of effort, followed by intermissions of rest. Thus when pupils (and the younger they are the more is this true) have a given amount of work to do requiring their attention say for an hour and a half they will accomplish most with least waste of energy by breaking up this long stretch into several parts, interspersing a few minutes of free play. With adults application may profitably continue for longer periods, but even here the rhythm of concentration and relaxation must be observed in order that effort may have the most fruitful issue. There would assuredly be less dullness, carelessness, and disorder in our schools, high and low, and in our homes, if this law were observed in the arrangement of the activities of daily life. The writer knows of a normal school where the work begins at half past eight in the morning and continues until one o'clock, with a pause of only ten minutes in the middle of the session. During the passage of classes from room to room at the close of recitations, monitors are placed in the halls to prevent any exhibition of freedom in communicating with one another or in the movements of the body. Here there is little if any relief to the attention, since pupils are under practically the same constraint as when reciting in Latin, Greek, or geometry. This enthronement of discipline, which we all seem natively to think necessary that we may prevent the reversionary tendencies of youth, is sure to breed in some measure the very maladies--stupidity and disorder--which various agencies in society are striving to cure by all sorts of formulæ.

[Footnote 48: _Op. cit._]

[Footnote 49: Pedagogical Seminary, vol. iii, pp. 213 _et seq._]

In the normal, well-organized adult brain the various areas are closely knit together by association pathways or fibers,[50] which renders it possible to employ in particular direction the energies generated over large regions. But this development comes relatively late and is not fully completed under about thirty-three years of age, it is now believed. It is in a measure, then, impossible for the young child to utilize the energies produced in one part of the brain in activities involving remote sections. One who observes little children in their spontaneous activities can not fail to note evidences in plenty in illustration of this principle. It should be apparent, then, why a school programme so arranged that a lesson in writing is followed by one in written language, this by written number, and this in turn by written spelling, or possibly by a written reproduction of a lesson in Nature or literature, is admirably suited to exhaust the overused areas of pupils' brains, whereupon the mental and physical effects of fatigue make their appearance. In one of the large cities of our country the amount of time spent in writing was calculated for all the grades in the schools, and it was found that at least one hour was required of the children in every grade, and in the fourth and fifth grades they were engaged for two hundred minutes every day in writing in some form or other.

[Footnote 50: Donaldson, The Growth of the Brain, chapters ix to xiii.]

Doubtless every one has observed how readily he becomes fatigued when he is engaged in activities demanding very delicate muscular adjustments--threading a needle, for instance. Work of this character involves particularly the higher co-ordinating areas of the brain, those controlling the more precise and elaborate adjustments of the body, and this work makes large demands upon one's nervous energy. This seems to be pre-eminently true of the child, in whose brain the highest regions are yet comparatively undeveloped, so that much exercise of them leads quickly to exhaustion. Those activities, then, which compel a great amount of exact co-ordination of young children will easily fatigue them. The writer has for some time been observing the effect of various sorts of playthings upon the activities, particularly upon the emotions, of two young children. He has noticed that those plays requiring most accurate co-ordination, as stringing kindergarten beads with small openings or writing with a hard lead pencil, will quickly produce fatigue, shown in irritability, discontent, and lack of control; while those plays which employ the larger muscles, as working in sand or drawing a cart, are more enduring in their interest and are not attended by such disagreeable after effects. It is customary, however, in many homes and schools to require of the youngest children the finest work in the management of the smallest tools and materials, such, for instance, as writing on very narrow spaced paper, greater freedom being permitted in this respect as the pupil grows older--an inversion of the natural order. The mode of development of the nervous system indicates unmistakably that in all training the individual should proceed gradually from the acquirement of _strength_ and _force_ in large, coarse, and relatively inexact movements to the acquisition of _skill_ in precisely co-ordinated activities.

Any reference to the remediable causes of mental fatigue would be incomplete without allusion to the harmful influence of certain personal characteristics in the people with whom we associate. By virtue of a great law of our being, that of suggestion, the importance of which we are appreciating more fully from day to day, we tend ever to reproduce within ourselves the activities of the things in our environment.[51] Now, when we are forced to remain in the presence of one fatigued, as pupils too frequently are in the school and children in the home, and this fatigue manifests itself in irritability, impatience, tension of voice, and constraint of face and body--in such an environment we become overstimulated ourselves and rapidly waste our energies. Especially true is this of children, who are more suggestible than adults; and, in view of this, one can appreciate the necessity of placing in our schoolrooms, and if we could in our homes, persons possessing an endowment of nervous energy adequate for the demands to be made upon it without inducing too readily fatigue with all its train of evils.

[Footnote 51: _Cf._ Sidis, The Psychology of Suggestion; and Vernon Lee and C. A. Thompson, Beauty and Ugliness, Contemporary Review, vol. lxxii, pp. 544-569 and 669-688.]

BEST METHODS OF TAXATION.

BY THE LATE HON. DAVID A. WELLS.

PART II.

In passing from the tariff, or duties on imports, to the internal or excise taxes imposed by the Federal Government, there is evidently a distinct change in purpose. However subject to abuse the tax on distilled spirits has proved, and however frequently its agency has been invoked to exaggerate the profits of interested parties, there has never been an open and avowed intention of turning it to private gain. The policy that has become almost inseparable from the customs tariff, and is by most people regarded as inherent in all customs legislation, has not been transferred to the internal revenue taxes save in one or two instances of recent application and secondary importance. The danger of permitting taxation to be employed by either State or Federal Government for a purpose other than that of raising necessary revenue has been dwelt upon. When a police power is exercised in conjunction with a tax framed for revenue, and is regarded as the more important function to be performed, the policy requires careful examination. If revenue is the real object, the method of imposing the tax and the determination of the rate which will give the highest return with the least interference in the production, distribution, and export of the commodity taxed remains to be defined. If restriction in manufacture, sale, or consumption is intended, the question is no longer one of taxation proper, but of police regulation. The Federal taxes on oleomargarine, filled cheese, and mixed flour are of the nature of police inspection, and the tax on the circulation of State banks, amounting, as it has, to prohibition, is a still more extreme exercise of the same power. The imposition and collection of these duties have a penal quality, an intention to restrict or prohibit the production or sale or use of some article. They are not properly taxes; they are not a proper application of tax principles, but have originated, in private interest, or in the deliberate intention to constitute a monopoly, State or other.

The approach of war, or its actual presence, is made the excuse of an extension of taxes, and the Federal Government tacitly admits its inability to increase indirect taxes on consumption by its general resort to an extension of the internal taxes and excise. The instrumentalities of business offer a fair field for stamp taxes, and these, when not so burdensome as to invite evasion, are acceptable because of the ease with which they are assessed and collected. A specific duty on the more important acts of commerce and daily business may be evaded, it is true, but not when the paper or instrument taxed must become public evidence. Stamps of small denomination on bonds, debentures, or certificates of stock and of indebtedness; on a bill of sale or memorandum to sell; on bank checks, drafts, or certificates of deposit; bills of exchange, draft, or promissory note; money orders and bills of lading; on express and freight receipts, on telegraph messages, and a large number of legal and other instruments, such as leases, mortgages, charter party, insurance policies--these are simple duties, productive of large returns, and not unequal in their weight. The law of 1898 included such stamp taxes, as well as others on proprietary articles and wines. It was not simple to predict the incidence of these rates, and the distribution has been unequal. The charges of one cent on telegraph messages and express packages are paid by the sender in the larger number of cases, the companies merely adding a penny to their rates. This was not the intention of the law, and the courts have held that it was not so intended. The individual is powerless in a few transactions, and only the great concerns are able to avail themselves of this decision. The duties for seats or berths in a parlor car or for proprietary medicines, are paid by the company or manufacturer, though in certain preparations the price to the consumer was advanced on the passage of the act. With all their drawbacks, and they are not few in number, these stamp duties afford a ready means of obtaining a good revenue without increasing unduly the general burdens of taxation. The law of 1898 was modeled after that of 1863, and many of the rates and descriptions will undoubtedly be incorporated into the permanent internal revenue system of the country--a measure enforced by the remarkably unequal returns derived from the customs.

The existing system of internal duties is even more defensible than the tariff as a source of revenue. Its inequalities, due to the haste in which the measure was prepared and the inexperience of those who framed the provisions and fixed upon the rates, are worn away in use, and where the rates are moderate and are not infected with a penal quality, the community adapts itself to them, accepting them as a necessary convenience. In the United States this spirit of acquiescence is most marked, not only because of a natural patience of tax burdens, but because of as natural a fear of other untried and more radical or oppressive measures. The situation of "business" when a general tariff bill is pending in Congress is one almost of panic, and the scramble to protect interests or to obtain some special advantage against rivals has become a scandalous feature of tariff revision. Except in the instances named, as oleomargarine and filled cheese, the internal revenue system presents less of a field for such an exhibition of greed and self-interest; but the spirit duties, and even the tobacco rates, may be used in such a way as to favor the large manufacturer against the small concerns, and are to that extent misused and applied for purposes antagonistic to those properly pertaining to taxation. In a time of tax revision the suggestions for new taxes and ideas for changing the old are freely offered, and do not stop short of absolute prohibition of an industry, of total destruction of interest. The vagaries of a legislative body under such suggestions have instilled into the public mind a wholesome fear of its possible acts and fully explain the timid and uneasy condition of "business" when a general tax measure is under discussion. Whether it be the manufacturer or producer seeking protective duties, or the Granger or Populist asking for taxes of confiscation against capital and accumulated property, the spirit is the same--a desire to turn taxation to improper purposes.

The tendency of Federal taxation to turn to taxes on capital and the instruments of "business"--direct, rather than indirect taxes--found its most extreme illustration in the income tax of 1894, the principles of which have already been discussed. It finds a more moderate and restricted exercise in certain graduated duties under the act of 1898, and especially in the duties on legacies and distributive shares of personal property. It was no sentimental or even theoretical argument based upon the right of inheritance or the inequality of taxation that led to the adoption of these duties in 1898; it was only a blind following of the provisions of the earlier act, and the consciousness that revenue must be had at every cost, and no possible source of income should be overlooked. Yet the legacy tax is essentially a tax of democracy and defensible for much the same reasons as a tax, whether graduated or not, upon income might be.

By the act approved June 13, 1898, entitled "An act to provide ways and means to meet war expenditures, and for other purposes," the national Government imposed a tax upon legacies and distributive shares of personal property. This tax has been one of the features of the tax law of 1862 (§§ 111-114), but in a much simpler form and in a form better calculated to produce a revenue. This earlier law imposed a duty on all legacies exceeding one thousand dollars in amount, but very properly made a distinction in the rate according to the degree of connection between the person from whom the property came and the receiver of the legacy. Thus, lineal issue or lineal ancestor, brother or sister, should pay at the rate of seventy-five cents for each and every hundred dollars of the clear value of the interest in the property. A descendant of a brother or sister of the decedent paid double this rate; an uncle or an aunt was taxed three dollars for every one hundred dollars passing; a great-uncle or a great-aunt, four dollars; and persons in any other degree of collateral consanguinity, or a stranger, or a body politic or corporate, five dollars. The only exemption made was in favor of a wife or husband. As only personal property was intended to be reached, all land and real estate escaped the duty.

The law of 1898 made important modifications in these rates and manner of assessing. In the first place, the rates fell only on legacies in excess of $10,000, a limit ten times larger than that of the law of 1862. The degrees of relationship were the same, the rates were copied from those of the earlier act, and the same exemption of property passing between husband and wife was admitted. But the idea of a progressive tax was ingrafted into the law. Thus, the old rates applied only to legacies of more than $10,000 and not more than $25,000. When the property passing was valued between $25,000 and $100,000 the rates were multiplied by one and a half; between $100,000 and $500,000, they were multiplied by two; between $500,000 and $1,000,000, they were multiplied by two and a half; and by three when the property was in excess of $1,000,000. In restricting the tax to personal property passing by inheritance the measure aims at a crude means of making the burdens of personal more nearly approach those of real property. No such consideration controlled the views of those responsible for the act, and, after all, it offers only a question of theoretical interest. The inheritance tax collected in many of the States may have owed their adoption to such an idea, but the United States, in taking up these duties, merely saw a means of obtaining revenue without regarding the actual results of the tax on the estates paying it.

"The inheritance tax in one form or another has come to stay, and new States are being added every year to the list of those which have adopted it. Five years ago it was found in only nine States of the Union--Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, New York, West Virginia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and New Jersey. During the first half of 1893 Ohio, Maine, California, and Michigan were added to the list, though the Michigan law was afterward annulled because of an unusual provision in the State Constitution which was not complied with. In 1894 Louisiana revived her former tax on foreign heirs; Minnesota adopted a constitutional amendment permitting a progressive inheritance tax which has not yet been given effect by the Legislature; and Ohio added to her collateral inheritance tax a progressive tax on direct successions. In 1895 progressive inheritance taxes were adopted in Illinois and Missouri, and an old proportional tax was revived in Virginia; and last year Iowa adopted in part the inheritance tax recommendation of her revenue commission."[52]

[Footnote 52: Max West, in North American Review, May, 1897, p. 635.]

The real problems are to be encountered in local taxation. The many different methods used in the different States, the want of uniformity in the local divisions of each State, and the extraordinary diversity in the interpretation or application of tax laws by the courts and executive authorities of the States have introduced a confusion, to end which, many would invoke the intervention of the Federal Government. The haphazard manner in which the laws have been framed and passed is only the least notable explanation of the variety of phrase and interpretation to be found. Even were the Federal Government to establish definitions, and frame rules of uniform assessment, there would still be room for difference. The customs tariff is known to be variously applied in the different ports of the country, and there is greater certainty in the tariff rate than could be found in a tax resting on the assessed valuation of land, for example.

The difficulty encountered by France in its attempt to determine the net income from land for the purposes of taxation carries an important lesson. Failing to obtain uniformity of appraisement of this net income under the crude method first employed--of basing it on the character of soil and nature of cultivation, deducting the expenses of cultivation--a _cadastre_ was decreed.[53] In this _cadastre_ each particular piece of property was recorded, with its boundaries, its manner of cultivation, and its net rental. Begun in 1807, it was not completed until 1850, and proved of little value, as no provision had been made for recording the changes in cultivation, rentals, or other conditions, except those of ownership, buildings, and exemption from taxes. Instead of proving a successful means to a desired end, it "turned out to be a stupendous disillusionment." "The experience of both the western Prussian provinces and of France showed that the newly constructed _cadastre_ was of considerable service in equalizing the land tax within a relatively small area, but not as a basis for alterations in the contingents to be paid by large and widely separated regions. The officials in charge of the _cadastre_ on the Rhine, as well as those in France, themselves admitted that any computation of net income was uncertain; that the coincidence of the figures obtained by the cadastral computation with the actual net income could never be assured; that the figures afforded by the _cadastre_ were rather of the nature of a proportion, while uniformity of assessment was to be attained rather by observation of the business transacted than by depending on the figures obtained by computation."[54] This effort to discover and record the net income from land was a failure.

[Footnote 53: The word _cadastre_ was derived from the Latin _capitastrum_, or register of _capita_, _griga_, or units of territorial taxation into which the Roman provinces were divided for the purposes of _capitatio terrena_, or land tax. It is of modern use and is locally found in Louisiana.]

[Footnote 54: Cohn, Science of Finance, p. 477.]