Yet one more drop remained to fill the cup of Democratic humiliation to overflowing. The constitutionality of the income tax had been assumed to have been settled by previous decisions of the Supreme Court, especially that in the case Springer _v._ United States, which had been decided in 1880, and in which the Court had upheld the law. The new tax was brought before the Court in 1894, in Pollock _v._ Farmers' Loan and Trust Company. The argument against the tax was pressed with great vigor, not merely on constitutional grounds, but for evident social and economic reasons. Important financial interests engaged powerful legal talent and it became clear that the question to be settled was as much a class and sectional controversy as a constitutional problem. Counsel urged the Court that the tax scattered to the winds the fundamental principles of the rights of private property. Justice Field, deciding against the tax, declared it an "assault upon capital" and a step toward a war of the poor against the rich. There was fear among some that the exemption of the smaller incomes might result in placing the entire burden of taxation on the wealthy. Justice Field, for example, felt that taxing persons whose income was $4,000 and exempting those whose income was less than that amount was like taxing Protestants, as a class, at one rate and Catholics at another. The sectional aspects of the controversy were brought out in objections that the bulk of the tax would fall on the Northeast. The most important point involved was the meaning of the word "direct" as used in the Constitution in the phrase "direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States ... according to their respective Numbers." If an income tax is a direct tax, it must be apportioned among the states according to population. Unhappily the framers of the Constitution were not clear as to what they meant by the word direct, and specifically they could not have told whether an income tax was direct or not, because no such tax existed in England or America at that time. Hence the Supreme Court was placed in the awkward position of defining a word which the framers themselves could not define, although the uniform practice hitherto had been to regard the income tax as indirect and therefore constitutional, even if not apportioned according to population.