trary the advantages offered and the expense incurred in behalf of individual citizens are in this case quite readily computed and apportioned. That this method of apportionment is after all made subsidiary to the principle of the tax is due the conviction, based on social-political considerations, that a helping hand should be extended to the needy majority of those who make use of the schools. But in proportion as these straitened circumstances are not present, in proportion, that is, as the question concerns those grades of instruction which in a preponderating degree serve the purposes of the well-to-do classes alone, the necessity of apportioning payments to advantages enjoyed by individuals makes itself felt, and therefore arises also the expediency of fees.

It is true, the recognition of the indirect effects of public instruction modifies this view of the question to some extent. At the same time the requirement of that equity which is to be preserved as between members of the same social stratum, with respect to their varying pecuniary capacity, demands that this recognition should be allowed but a guarded influence. The outcome of all this is that in the middle and higher grades of public instruction a broad field is left open for the fee.

109. We have now passed in review all the different kinds. of public exactions, so far as they have hitherto been recognized and adopted in the administrative system of any political organization.

The foregoing analysis of the services rendered by the public administration, which constitute the basis of the corresponding forms of payments exacted, has brought to light one other important consideration in the way of peculiar motives existing in the relation of the individual to the community, but which does not result in any peculiar adaptation in the form of payments.

This is the difference in ability between the different individuals and strata of society already explained above (secs. 85-90). There is no further peculiar form of payment avail

able to meet this difference. The form which we have come to know as a tax in the narrower sense will also have to serve for the equitable satisfaction of the claims represented by this consideration.

If the tax, in the sense above (sec. 99) developed, of itself goes in the direction of apportioning payment to ability, this further consideration, which demands that the stronger should assist the weaker, can only help on in the same direction and bring the tax system into a form that shall still more distinctly graduate payments in proportion to pecuniary ability.

What is exacted in accordance with this view will continue in any case to figure as a sort of "compensation," in the best sense, if the profounder view is taken of the relation in which the life of the individual stands to that of the whole-the view expressed in the old phrase of Montesquieu : "en naissant on contracte envers la patrie une dette immense dont on ne peut jamais s'acquitter"; which has again quite lately been expressed so felicitously by the English philosopher, Huxley2.

As Huxley, in his beautiful essay on the Struggle for Existence, says: "If I was not at my birth immediately annihilated I owe it either to the natural affection of those about me, which I had done nothing to deserve, or to fear of the law which had been established centuries before my birth by the society into which I made my entrance. If I was nourished, cared for, educated, I know of nothing I had done to deserve those advantages. And if today I possess anything, even if I owe to the sweat of my brow what I do possess, I must not forget that without the organization of society, which is the outcome of the struggles of a long series of generations, I should probably possess nothing more than a stone hatchet and a miserable hut, and even these would be mine only so long as no more powerful savage happened to come my way. But from this it follows that if society has done

1 De l'esprit des lois, vol. v. p. 3. It is true, Montesquieu's own theory of taxation is not in accord with this maxim: Les revenus de l'état sont une portion que chaque citoyen donne de son bien pour avoir la sûreté de l'autre.-Vol. xiii. p. 1.

In the Nineteenth Century, February 1888.

all these things for me gratuitously, and then requires me to pay something toward its support-suppose this something is a contribution toward the education of children belonging to othersI should be ashamed, in spite of all my individualistic inclinations, to say no. And in case I were not moved by shame, I believe society would be in the right if it were to convert its moral claim into a legally binding one. It would be thoroughly unjust to let the willing horse draw the whole load."

CHAPTER IV.

THE STRUCTURE AND FINANCIAL RELATIONS OF PUBLIC ORGANIZATIONS.

LITERATURE. Alexis de Tocqueville, De la democratie en Amérique, 1834; 14th ed. 1864. L. Stein, Lehrbuch der Finanzwissenschaft, 5th ed. 1885, vol. i. pp. 50-89. A. Wagner, Finanzwissenschaft, 3d ed. 1883, vol. i. secs. 38-59. A. Wagner, "Reichsfinanzwesen" (v. Holtzendorff's Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Rechtspflege des Deutschen: Reichs, vol. i. pp. 581 et seq., 1871; vol. iii. pp. 60 et seq., 1874). Schriften des Vereins für Sozialpolitik, vol. xii.-"Die Kommunalsteuerfrage," 1877.. G. Cohn, "Die Steuerreform im Kanton Zürich und der Bundeshaushalt der Schweiz," 1884 (Nationalökonomische Studien, 1886, pp. 315 et seq.).. F. Freiherr von Reitzenstein, "Ueber finanzielle Konkurrenz von Gemeinden, Kommunalverbänden und Staat" (Schmoller's Jahrbuch, 1887,. 1888). "Das kommunale Finanzwesen," by The Same (Schönberg's Handbuch der politischen Oekonomie, 2d ed. 1885).

I. THE STRUCTURE OF THE COMMONWEALTH.

§ 110. If I use the expression "public organizations" (öffentliche Verbände), rather than "the public organization" it is because the unity of that public organization which answers to our concept of the state presents itself to us in the guise of a multiplicity of organizations, rising one above another and resulting in a totality only through their organic union with one another.

From this point of view the state presents itself to us as a structure making up an undivided whole, rising to a single, central apex, but the constituent parts of which rise one above another in sharply defined gradations.

In the current views of the matter this unity is but imperfectly apprehended, as is shown by this, among other things, that the inclination commonly is not so much to conceive of the state in this broader sense, but rather to narrow the concept far enough

to admit of contrasting the state with its own constituent parts. This view has a substantial ground in the sense that it is a survival handed down from an era when the national idea was yet engaged in a struggle to reduce these disjointed members to order and unity; but it is a conception which falls far short of apprehending the essential character of the modern state.

§ III. If we examine the state, considered as a structure of the nature indicated above, the lowest form of political association is the Commune (Gemeinde).

The commune is the elementary structure, both in the sense that it is accepted by the consciousness of the individual members as the immediate fundamental form of public organization, and also in the sense that in point of historical development it is the first link of the chain.

The characteristic feature of the commune is the fact that it is a neighborhood organization, which owes its origin to an extension of the relation of kinship beyond the limits of the family and the individual household, and signifies that the members of the commune have come to share in those good offices of human intercourse of which, within its narrower sphere, the family affords a ready illustration.

The nearer we approach its beginnings, the more self-contained and exclusive is this elementary social organism; the more does it unite in itself all the essential functions which in the course of development fall to the state. The commune is the ultimate cell, as it were, of the state, from which, by progressive segmentation and differentiation, arises the organism with which we have here to deal.

§ 112. The character of this neighborhood organization is somewhat modified by the divergent conditions under which rural and urban social life is carried on.

In the historical development, the rural commune, occupying a greater space, is the earlier of the two. The large area occupied by agriculture as contrasted with handicraft and trade, requires