There are several difficulties in administering such a tax which have stood in the way of its general and permanent adoption. No one has yet devised a certain or fair method of estimating income. The peculiarities of any business or employment make great variation in the ability given by a certain income in dollars and cents. The business man in a small town, with an income of $5,000, might live in relative luxury, and still have a surplus for investment in his business. The same man, attempting business in a large city, might, even with an income of $10,000, find it barely possible to keep up appearances. The income of farmers is largely in provisions and personal privileges from use of teams, etc., never counted in dollars and cents, while the village mechanic pays from his measured income for all such comforts, or goes without them. The actual, necessary expenses of the business of a professional man in the way of books and travel are as essential to his business as are farm implements and live stock to the farm; yet no one counts such expenses as a subtraction from the income. A teacher promoted to a higher position is at once subjected to extraordinary expenses, and may be less able with a higher salary to meet the requirements of his new life than he was with a lower salary to meet the less expensive requirements. Another principal difficulty is the unpopularity of such a tax from its necessary interference with private business. The country will be almost certainly more divided along lines of wealth over an income tax than over anything else. On the part of the wealthy it seems an effort of the people to take from them actual property rights. On the part of the poorer classes it fosters the assumption that the more wealthy are unjustly so. In the nature of the case, it is an arbitrary adjustment without the possibility of establishing exact reasons for any distinctions made. Finally, since such distinctions are liable to be varied from time to time, an income tax requires some nice adjustment as to the nature of the income. An income from the sale of property is entirely different in character from the income made by interest on the same property. One is a part of permanent investment, the other is the result of productive investment. One destroys the principal if consumed, the other adds to the principal. Yet no one could arrive at the actual, natural income, without a most intricate system of book-keeping open to public inspection. For without public inspection the temptation to fraudulent returns, under the feeling that the tax is unjust, is so strong as to be demoralizing.