TAX SALES, a public sale of land, according to law, for non-payment of taxes assessed upon it. Some general principles may be stated, as running through the stat utes of all or nearly all the states; but as the proceedings are regulated entirely by statute, the rights of the purchasers under, and of the original owners before such sales, the manner in which such sales are conducted, and the regulations in regard to laying taxes differ widely in different states. In the first place the assessed tax must be uncol lected upon land unexempt. The land cannot be legally sold after payment or tender, either by the owner or any person whose interests would suffer by the sale. The statu tory provisions before and during the sale must be exactly followed. The tax must have been properly assessed, the proper officer must have attempted to collect it, the sale must be public, duly advertised, take place at the advertised time and place, etc. The land is sold to the highest cash bidder, to whom a certificate is given, entitling him to a deed at the end of the statutory period, during which the owner may redeem, and after which a deed from the state is given to the purchaser. In a majority of the states at present this deed is primci facie evidence of the regularity of all the proceedings on the sale. At common law, and by the statutes of some states, it rests upon the pur chaser to prove the regularity of such proceedings.. In some states it must have been decided by the proper court that the taxes are unpaid, before a sale can take place.
This term, as expressing the exaction of money from the indi vidual for the service of the state, is familiar to all mankind a step above barbarism; and yet few subjects are surrounded by a greater number of practical difficulties and theoreti cal niceties. These may be grouped under two sets of considerations—those which affect the justice of a tax, and those which affect its productiveness, and these two often tell on each other. Taxation, indeed, has so frequently been the means of perpetrating political injustice, that the term has fallen into bad popular repute. Wheneverthe prod uce of a tax is used otherwise than in the service of those who pay it, the tax is unjust. In its more oppressive form, it has been levied on conquered states, for the benefit of the conquerors, and in this shape it has sometimes been called tribute. The direction
which all constitutional struggles to cleanse taxation from injustice have taken has been that of self-taxation, the community as a whole deciding on what it requires to take from the individual members for the public service. The accomplishment of this has been the chief object of all the struggles which have made a free constitution for the British empire. There were old feudal dues which the monarchs had the power of exacting; but when these were insufficient for their ambitious projects, they had to ask parliament for a supply, and parliament generally took the opportunity of granting it to demand redress of grievances. It came thus to be a fundamental constitutional doc trine, that no tax can be levied save by the consent of the representatives of the people who have to pay it. The constitutional doctrine thus created by Britain was remem bered by the American colonies when Mr. Grenville sought to raise there a stamp-duty and a customs-duty on tea, and the colonies revolted under the celebrated cry that " tax ation without representation is tyranny!" It was discovered, in the course of the long struggle of the house of commons to keep its hold on the purse, that the least afflictive of taxes may be the most dangerous. A fixed land-tax comes, for instance, to be no impost at all, in the afflictive sense of the term. If a thousand a year have been drawn off a certain acreage of land from time immemorial, the proprietors never possessed that part of the rents, and are no more sufferers from not having them than from not possessing their neighbors' estates. A government with a large revenue of this kind, however, will certainly be inimical to freedom. The time when the liberties of England were in the greatest danger was the twelve years of Charles L's reign in which lie was able to get on without going to par liament for money. The extravagance of sovereigns who wasted the domains of the crown has generally prevented them from having too formidable an influence by the possession of independent incomes. In Britain, this difficulty has been effectually guarded against, and any of the expenses of the crown which can now be paid without going annually to parliament for a vote of supply are of a very trifling character.