Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

“ They do not support the broad proposition that to negotiable paper can be ascribed such tangibility and entity as so to make it a taxable object of itself in a jurisdiction other than that of the obligation it represents. This broad generality is necessary to sustain the tax in the present case if it can be regarded a direct tax on property, for Illiniois, not New York, is the situs of the debts of which the notes taxed are the evidence, and of the mortgages which secure them. ”

“ Again, for the purposes of argument we may assume that there are limits to this kind of power; that the presence of a deed would not warrant a tax measured by the value of the real estate that it had conveyed, or even that a memorandum of a contract required by the statute of frauds would not support a tax on the value of the contract because it happened to be found in the testator's New York strong box. But it is plain that bills and notes, whatever they may be called, come very near to identification with the contract that they embody. ”

“ It is not primitive tradition alone that gives their peculiarities to bonds, but a tradition laid hold of, modified and adapted to the convenience and understanding of business men. The same convenience and understanding apply to bills and notes, as no one would doubt in the case of bank notes, which technically do not differ from others. It would be an extraordinary deduction from the 14th Amendment to deny the power of a state to adopt the usages and views of business men in a statute on the ground that it was depriving them of their property without due process of law. ”