IN MASSACHUSETTS A Treatise on the Assessment and Collection of Taxes BY PHILIP NICHOLS Formerly Assistant Corporation Counsel of the City of Boston “The Law of Land Damages in Massachusetts " and "The Power of Eminent Domain" BOSTON THE FINANCIAL PUBLISHING COMPANY INTRODUCTION. The statutes of Massachusetts relating to the assessment and collection of taxes although codified by the legislature as recently as 1909 are the result of a gradual growth and development extending over nearly three centuries. To understand the true significance of these statutes it is frequently necessary to study them in their original form and to note the amendments that have been made from year to year, and the defects which these amendments were intended to cure, as well as the decisions of the supreme judicial court interpreting the statutes, keeping in mind the exact state of the law when such decisions were rendered and the changes in the statutes which frequently were made for the very purpose of modifying the effect of the decisions. The decisions of the supreme judicial court on close questions arising on the subject of taxation frequently display the most exhaustive research, the court beginning with the earliest enactment of the statute in controversy in the colonial period and tracing it year by year through the annual tax acts of the provincial period and checking it off with here a decision and there an amendment through the different codifications down to the present time, before it can reach a conclusion as to the true meaning of the statute under consideration. An attorney in preparing a brief or an opinion upon the subject of taxation to reach a satisfactory result is obliged to follow the same method. The author, having in the course of a practice which has been centered to a considerable extent upon contested tax cases been obliged to study the subject of taxation in many of its phases, has undertaken to put into print the result of his investigations with the hope that it may be of service both to the legal profession and to the infinite number of laymen who are interested in the subject either for reasons affecting their personal concerns or because of its importance to the community. The scheme of the book is to explain the general system of taxation and the relation of the different provisions of statute to each other as parts of a comprehensive whole, to trace the history and development of |