of the Rev. Stat. sec. 4178, as now existing, the court below said:

"Appellee had a right to cause its boats to be registered at Paducah, although that was not the place nearest to the port where it resided; and it fully complied with the law regulating the subject, by painting the words 'of Paducah, Ky.,' on the stern thereof; and by the amendment of 1884, Paducah became the home port of the vessels so registered and marked."

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"The steamboats involved in this litigation are separated from the residence of their owner by a long distance in both geography and time; in fact, they can never visit the port at which their owner resides; they are, so far as their actual situs is concerned, permanently confined to the rivers over which they float; if their home port had to be Chicago, because that is the residence of their owner, as under the law prior to 1884, then they would have a home port from which they could derive no advantage or protection, because they could never reach it. It was to obviate this hardship, with others, that the act of 1884 was passed by Congress, permitting their owners to select for them a home port in the field of their operations, which is for them a home port in fact, as well as in law and name. Property, such as that under consideration, ought, logically, to be taxed at its own home port; there it can be seen and properly valued for assessment by the fiscal officers; whereas, at the residence of its owner (Chicago), the officers, of necessity, must rely on the statements of the latter for both its existence and its value. At its home port it enjoys the protection of the laws of the jurisdiction in which it is located, and both justice and reason would seem to require that property thus permanently located, both in legal contemplation and in fact, within a jurisdiction foreign to that of its owner, should contribute its fair share to the support of that government whose protection it enjoys."

It is at once apparent that this line of reasoning, whilst it

asserts the principle of actual situs and expounds the act of 1884 as making that the exclusive rule to test the power to tax, at once causes the act to destroy the very principle which it was assumed the act upheld. This is the inevitable consequence of the conclusion reached by the court below, that the act of 1884 endowed the owner of a vessel with the power, simply by the painting a name of a place upon his vessel, to make such place the situs for taxation, although it might be neither the actual situs of the property nor the residence of the owner.

The act in question was an elaborate one, containing thirty sections, relating to the American merchant marine, and was entitled "An act to remove certain burdens on the American merchant marine and encourage the American foreign carrying trade and for other purposes." 23 Stat. 53. The only provision contained in that act which had any reference to the subject under consideration and which was relied upon in the court below was section 21, which we have previously quoted, and which we again copy:

"SEC. 21. That the word 'port,' as used in sections fortyone hundred and seventy-eight and forty-three hundred and thirty-four of the Revised Statutes, in reference to painting the name and port of every registered or licensed vessel on the stern of such vessel, shall be construed to mean either the port where the vessel is registered or enrolled, or the place in the same district where the vessel was built or where one or more of the owners reside."

Clearly this section does not essentially change the prior general law respecting enrollment, as it simply enlarges the power of an owner in regard to painting on the stern of his vessel the name of the place from which he may desire to hail her. The prior provisions as to enrollment clearly exacted that the owner, as an incident to enrollment, should mark upon his vessel the name of the place of enrollment; in other words, compelled the owner to hail his vessel from the place of enrollment, although he might be domiciled elsewhere. Now,

as the settled rule at the time of the passage of this act was that enrollment, and consequent marking of the stern of the vessel with the name of the place of enrollment, was not the criterion by which to determine the power of taxation, it is impossible to conceive that Congress intended, by merely conferring a privilege to select the name of a place other than the port of enrollment to be marked upon a vessel, to overthrow the settled rules in regard to taxation of such property which existed at the time of the passage of the act of 1884. To give to the statute the construction adopted by the court below would be simply to hold that its purpose was to endow the owner with the faculty of arbitrarily selecting a place for the taxation of his vessel in defiance of the law of domicil and in disregard of the principle of actual situs, since by the statute the owner was given the right to paint either the name of the place where the vessel was built, where enrolled, or where one of the owners resided. And this demonstrates the misconception of the construction given to the act of 1884 by the court below, since the court declared that the whole effect of the act was to endow the owner of vessels with the power to select, by marking on the stern, a place "in the field of operations," which should be the place of taxation. But no such limitation as the field of operations can be implied from the language of the statute, and, therefore, if the construction adopted were upheld the unlimited right of the owner to arbitrarily frustrate the taxing laws of the State where he was rightfully subject to taxation would result.

Undoubtedly, as we have said, the general statutes as to enrollment in force prior to 1884 required that the name of the port to be painted upon the vessel should be the port of enrollment, although such place might not be the domicil of the owner. In practice, however, that rule was not always observed, because the owners of vessels desired to hail them from the place of the residence of the owner. The Albany, 4 Dill. 439. And the history of the adoption of the provision now known as section 21 of the act of 1884 referred to leaves.

no room for doubt that Congress simply intended to legalize such practice. The provision had its origin in an amendment unanimously reported by the Committee on Commerce of the Senate on May 1, 1884, to a bill then pending in the Senate. The chairman of the committee, in reporting the proposed amendment, said (15 Cong. Rec. p. 3650):

"Mr. FRYE. The next amendment I am authorized to offer is a section in reference to the painting of the name of the ship on the stern. Not very important that must appear to Senators. Many of our shipowners in the State of Maine think more of that than they do of the rest of this bill. The man who owns a ship looks upon her as his wife or his children; he loves his ship; and under the law as it stands to-day he is required to paint on the stern the name, it may be that of his wife or of his daughter and the port to which she belongs. For seventy-five years the port to which she belonged was construed to be the place where she was owned, and if a man built a ship in Surry, and she was owned there, he painted on the stern the 'May Ann, from Surry, Me.' In 1875 a sharp Treasury official discovered that it was a violation of the law. He reported to the Secretary of the Treasury, and the Secretary issued an order that all those ships must bear the name of the port of entry, regardless of where they were built or owned. They are building vessels, home vessels, owned at home, owned in families, in many instances by the blacksmith, the carpenter, the captain, and the mate. Their vessels they wish to name after one of the family and the home, the place where she is owned and built, and yet under the construction of the Treasury Department she may be the 'Julia Ann,' from Machias, her port of entry, but actually built and owned a hundred miles from there. Take Bath and Richmond, on the Kennebec River-Bath, the greatest shipbuilding city in the United States to-day of wooden ships; her rival, Richmond, is fifteen miles above. The men who build their ships in Richmond regard it as about as serious a wrong as can be imposed upon them by law to compel them

to put a ship built there and owned there under the name of Bath, her port of entry, and Bath would fully reciprocate under like circumstances. I take it that no Senator will object to that provision.

"Mr. HALE. Just there let me ask my colleague, was not the reason for the ruling of the Secretary of the Treasury that the technical view was taken of the word 'port,' and it was concluded there could be nothing but the port of entry, thereby taking away this privilege from the men who built the ship? "Mr. FRYE. I so understand it."

And, without debate, the amendment was adopted, and subsequently, with other amendments, was incorporated as part of the bill which came from the House of Representatives, relating to the same general subject as the bill which was under consideration in the Senate. 15 Cong. Rec. pp. 3869, 3973, 5440.

The suggestion that because the vessels were enrolled at Paducah the owner was estopped from disputing that they had a situs for taxation there, is but to contend that the place of enrollment was per se controlling, in disregard of the repeated rulings of this court to the contrary.

The judgment of the Court of Appeals of Kentucky must be reversed and the cause remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.