While the principle of equality of sacrifices forbids a rate of tax that would reach or approximate confiscation, it gives no definite indication of the proper scale of progression, or of the maximum limit that justice would set to the rate. Under our Federal law the highest rate on incomes is now 13 per cent.; under the Wisconsin law it is 6 per cent.; under the law of Prussia it is 4 per cent.; and under the British act of 1909 it is about 8-1/2 per cent. Evidently a much higher rate than any of these would be required to make any impression upon swollen fortunes. The British government recently (September, 1915) made the maximum rate about 33-1/3 per cent. To be sure, this is a war measure which probably will not continue after the restoration of peace. However, if it were made permanent it could not be proved to be unjust, provided that it were applied to the _increments_ of income above a certain high limit, but not to these incomes in their entirety. Our present inheritance taxes are very low, averaging less than 3 per cent. throughout the United States. Probably the highest rate is to be found in Wisconsin, where bequests to non relatives in excess of half a million dollars are subject to a tax of fifteen per cent. It is clear that all the existing rates could be raised very considerably without causing a violation of justice. Some years ago Andrew Carnegie recommended a tax of fifty per cent. on estates amounting to more than one million dollars.[199] No country has yet reached this high level of inheritance taxes. Nevertheless we cannot certainly stigmatise it as unjust either to the testator or his heirs, nor can we prove that it is in any other manner injurious to human welfare. All that can be said with confidence concerning the just rates of inheritance taxation must take the form of generalisations. The increments of the tax should correspond as closely as possible to the diminishing intensity of the wants which the tax deprives of satisfaction; in the case of each heir a certain fairly high minimum of property should be entirely exempt; on all the highest estates the rate should be uniform, and it should fall a long way short of confiscation; and the tax should at no point be such as to discourage socially useful activity and enterprise. _Effectiveness of Such Taxation_