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WILLIAMS' CASE, 255
as of the same nature. A tax of so much a head upon every slave
is properly a tax upon the profits of a certain species of stock
employed in agriculture; and as the greater part of the slave
owners in Maryland are both cultivators and owners of land, the
final payment of such a tax would fall upon them in their quality of
land owners without any retribution* (p) A poll tax of forty pounds
of tobacco on persons, called the assessment of forty per poll, was
laid here under the provincial government, for the support of the
clergy of the then established church, upon all male residents, and
upon all female slaves, and free female negroes and mulattoes
above sixteen years of age, except slaves adjudged by the county
court to be past labour, (q) And besides this tax of forty per poll,
there was also a poll tax imposed upon all the same description of
inhabitants; (r) and at times upon bachelors, (s) to raise a revenue
for the state. It is sufficiently evident however, that all kinds of
poll taxes upon free persons must be considered as haying been
denounced and totally abolished by this article, (t)
Under the provincial government, poor people who received
alms from the county, were exempted from taxation, (u) Such a
class of persons, it is evident, must necessarily be deemed paupers
within the meaning of the second clause of this article. In other
respects, however, it seems that the term pauper was not found to
be altogether free from ambiguity; and therefore, the Legislature
enacted, that all those whose property should not be valued abo^e
ten pounds, afterwards, forty dollars, should be declared paupers,
and not charged with any tax. (w) But where the tax has been
confined to county and special purposes, this pauper exemption,
without apparently doing violence to the constitutional rule of
equality, has been extended, in some counties, to those whose pro-
perty was not assessed to one hundred dollars, or to three hundred
dollars, (x) The first General Assembly of the Republic laid a
tax upon every person having any office of profit of five shillings
in the hundred pounds of the annual profits of such office; and
also a tax upon every person practicing law, or physic, and upon
(p) Smith's Weal, Nations, b. 5, c, 2, pt. 2.—(q) 1702, ch. 1, s. 3; 1715, ch. 15,
s. 5; 1725, ch. 4; 1763, ch. 18, s. n and 81.—(r) 1704, ch. 34; 1715, ch. 15, s. 5;
1754, ch. 9; 2 Bozman's His. Maryl. 204.—(s) 1756, ch. 5; 2 W. & M. c. 6, s. 11.—
(t) 1 Hume's Essays, Exper. 8 of Taxes; 1 Madison's Papers, 509.—(w) 1715, ch.
15, s. S.—(w) November, 1781, ch. 4, s. 68; November, 1782, ch. 6, s. 49; Novem-
ber, 1788, ch. 17, s. 86; 1784, ch. 56, s, 40; 1785, ch. 83, s. 17; 1792, ch. 71, s. 25;
1803, ch. 92, s. 18; 1812, ch. 191, s. 16; 1829, ch. 106, s. 6.—(x) 1817, ch. 41
and 49.
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