by Ouida
The number of vagrants and idlers is largely increased by the absurd law of the code which forces every parent to maintain a son, every brother a brother, every husband a wife, &c., however vicious, vile, or incurably lazy they may be; a law which indeed puts a premium on idleness, and attaches a penalty to industry; a law which in its effects on the youth of the country, is beginning to be dangerous. On those who are industrious and saving, the insatiable taxes bring oftentimes wholesale ruin; every trade and every employment is taxed as if it were a crime; every labouring man must pay his quota, and if he do not pay, his tools and all that he has are forfeited.
A recent Italian writer on the terrible state of the Romagna and the Marches observes very rightly that the great bulk of the people derive no sort of benefit from all the mass of money thrown away in the alterations of the old streets, and introductions of new methods in the cities. He justly observes that where the pilgrimages, once so continual, took money into all the villages and small towns, the railways take it all away, and render nine‐tenths of the provinces through which they pass poverty‐stricken. The tunnels of the Alps have the effect of drawing away the food that the nation itself requires. A few contractors are enriched; but the markets of the populace are denuded, and only the worst of the products of the soil, and of meat and poultry, finds its way to the nation’s mouth. Any night that you go down to any railway station when the goods‐trains pass, you will see tons on tons of vegetables, fruits and butcher’s meat going to France or Germany. What can be more disastrous, also, for a country whose populace chiefly depend for all their bodily strength on wine, to sell their grapes to French and German merchants? Yet this is what the landowners have been doing this year right and left. Dazzle the eyes of an Italian with a little immediate profit, and alas! you may plunge him headlong into any folly, make him consent to any speculation.
It is irritating to see the foreign press, which knows nothing actually of the conditions of things, laying down the law on Italian affairs. The English press attributes all the official evils of new Italy to the transmitted vices of the old régimes. Now I did not live during the old régimes, and cannot judge of them; but this I do know, that the bulk of people regret passionately the personal peace and simple plenty that were had under them. The vices of the present time are those of a grasping and swarming bureaucracy everywhere, and of the selfishness which is the worst note of the Italian character.
‘Why do you care for that horse being hurt? It is not your horse,’ everyone will say to you; an impersonal interest is a thing they cannot conceive.
‘Una vanità enorme, un’ aspro cinicismo ed i suoi interessi,’ says an Italian journalist of a living Italian minister, alone govern his conduct. Substitute for the bitter cynicism an indolent amiability that never exerts itself, and you have the characters of most Italian public men. The well‐meaning have no power to cope with the vast inert mass of nepotism and corruption that block the way to all real economy, to all true justice. Whatever names and parties change in the government, these always remain the same. Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose.
As an ounce of example is said to be worth a pound of precept, I will cite the following cases which have come under my eyes in the last three months:
1. A man living in one commune, but on the borders of another, having paid his taxes in the first, naturally refused to pay them over again in the second. As he would not submit to be twice taxed, the commune got a summons out against him with its usual result of distraint. He had nothing of any value but a gun; they seized that. A gentleman took the case up, and obliged them to confess the man had been in the right; they promised to return the gun, but as yet they have ‘not been able to find it.’
2. A contadino was going up a steep hill with some very heavy barrels of wine. Being a merciful man, to lighten his beast, he placed two barrels by the roadside, meaning to fetch them later. He was seen by a rural guard, though it was in a wild and lonely part of the hills. He was subsequently summoned and fined ten francs! There is a rule in rural police laws that a man must never let his horse pause in the road to rest; it would be an obstruction.
3. The wife of a navvy who remains in a city of central Italy while her husband is gone to work in Sardinia is in very great necessity and almost penniless; she has only a few sticks of furniture in a wretched room. One of her children fell ill with fever, and a gentleman sent her in a little bed for the sick child. The officers of the law saw the bed going in, and immediately assessed her for eight francs tassa di famiglia. She had not eight pence for the week’s bread. They might as well have asked her for a million.
What can one say of a municipal government in which such a state of things is possible?
Meanwhile, in the public offices, tens of thousands of dawdling youngsters lounge in for a few hours, and are subsidised at from a thousand to two thousand francs a year, to be entirely useless and grossly impudent.
A respectable man went the other day to pay something at a public office. Three young men were gossiping on the ground floor. They said, ‘it is not our business, go to the first floor;’ the first floor sent him to the second, the second to the third; the third to the fourth; the fourth told it was business for the ground floor. When he returned there they yawned and bade him ‘come back to‐morrow.’
At the customs‐offices, again, no one can be seen till nine; at three a great bell rings, and away they all go and the place is shut; a gardener of mine went to get a little parcel weighing half a chilo, and pre‐paid from Germany. They kept him four hours, then sent him away without it because the bell rang. He was kept from eleven to two the next day, and finally, with a sheaf of signed papers long enough to sign away a kingdom, he got the little parcel, which was only a book. Garibaldi used to curse the ‘black shoals’ of the priesthood; the ‘black shoals’ of the impiegati are a more ravenous, more idle, and far more cruel class; they are an unredeemed curse to the country, and if I could I would send nine‐tenths of them to hard labour to‐morrow. When a poor man goes to pay a tax for a dog there are all sorts of excuses from the impiegati; it is not the time to pay it, the books are being revised, he may come in a month, the streets are being renumbered, he had better call again when they are finished; anyhow, he cannot get his receipt. A little later down comes the Esattore of the commune for arrears of the dog tax. In vain the poor man protests; no one believes him. When he has paid, the demand is made over and over again. They assessed a poor baker the other day for two years’ dog tax with penalties; happily, I had paid the tax for him and so worsted them, as I produced the receipts. But if he had been alone, his receipts would have been insufficient to protect him.
This whole, enormous, and insatiable bureaucracy is like a sytaris; a sytaris, as you know, hides on a bee’s back, gets taken into the hive, then slips into the cell where the bee larva lies steeped in honey, and tucking itself snugly up in the cell, kills the larva and sucks all the honey; one fine day, having grown fat and mature, it flies away.
To the bureaucracy the whole public is what the bee larva is to the sytaris grub; a means of growing plump and living in sweetness. This is no question of ministries; it is a much deeper question; that of a gangrene putrefying in the body politic of the nation.
There is a little Almanac sold for a soldo and bought by tens of thousands of the poor of Italy, which, in a very well‐written little article addressed ‘Ai Signori Ministri,’ speaks of the unutterable misery brought on the industrious and honest classes by the frightful taxation which makes the peasant of Italy scarcely better than the fellah of Egypt.
Referring to the projected law of Seismet Doda for relieving the poor of these burdens (a law which is for ever being ‘considered’ by the Chambers, but never passed), it proceeds to point out how all the small proprietors and the respectable poor are being utterly destroyed off the land. All the working people who are ordered to pay fines, six, seven, eight, or ten lire to the tax‐ gatherer, or the municipal police, are sold up if th
ey cannot pay — sold up to the very tools of their trade.
The Esattore (examiner of taxes) published in one day for the little borghetto of Rocca Magna no less than fourteen forced sales of the houses or land of very poor men, which had been seized in the name of the State; little houses of three hundred or two hundred lire in worth, and in one instance the tax‐gatherer seized and sold a piece of arable ground at the price of a hundred and ten francs. Everything is confiscated, because, to the simple tax due, there are added all the expenses of fine, or execution, of law‐dues, and the costs of auction!
Let no one think that my poor old Pippo is an exaggeration. Pippo has a thousand, and ten thousand suffering likenesses of himself all over the land.
The little Almanac adds, bitterly and justly:
‘If all these working people, once content and labourious, thus dispossessed and driven out, cumber the prison, whose fault will it be? Who has caused them to change from peaceful, happy, country folks to despairing beggars? In the last
few years, nearly two million small proprietors have been ruined and sent into beggary; at the same time all beggary is treated as a crime deserving imprisonment.’
It concludes with the threat, Guai a voi, Deputati e Ministri se meriterete la maledizione dei poveri!
This is no vice of an old régime. In the old régime there was scarcely any taxation; it is the vice of a hard, grasping, and greedy bureaucracy, and of the fatal appetite for devouring public money, and manner of regarding every public place as a mere opportunity and occasion for private enrichment, which are the characteristic of all the public and political life of the country.
In addition to this overwhelming taxation, there is the black mail incessantly levied from the poor by the penalties that the municipalities assess at their pleasure and discretion. Half of these go to the municipal guard, and in the advertisements in newspapers inserted by communes who want a candidate for this noble office, this share of the fines is advertised as one of the attractions and perquisites of the post. It is easy to imagine what the public suffer three or four of these legalised and interested spies are allowed to stalk about every country lane, and peer into every hedge and spinney.
The timid purchase immunity from their torment at heavy cost of bribes; the courageous suffer incessantly from their espionage and hatred. By the police regulations of these gentlemen every harmless act in a day of country life may furnish food for fine and penalty. The testimony of the guard is taken as witness enough; and the poor man, harassed and fleeced by those set over him, and who should protect him, has no resource but to submit and pay. It is not too much to say that this daily and hourly tyranny and extortion of the myrmidons of the municipalities are, all over Italy, sowing the seeds of a bitter hatred of the Law.
The honest peasant sees himself ceaselessly spied on, worried, summoned, fined for all sorts of of harmless little things; his dog barks on his wall, his child spins a top on the road, or bathes in a river, he lays an armful of brushwood on a lonely forest path, he rests his old horse a moment by the wayside; forthwith the spy is down on him, and he has to deliver over all his wages for the day, perhaps all his wages for the week, to the petty officers and judges who are banded together in a body to pillage him. If he will bribe, he will be let alone: if he will not, he will be persecuted for all time till they make him a beggar.
Until the system is entirely abolished and replaced by something of real freedom for all honest men, I see no peace possible for the people; and were their rulers not blind as moles they would hasten to pluck out this ‘thorn from the foot’ ere its canker spreads over the whole body.
But alas! no one in office cares about any of these things. A week ago a famous Italian doctor rose in the Chambers and drew attention to the destruction of the woods of Latium and the rural guards’ connivance at these repeated infringements (for base reasons) of forest‐law. He was listened to with apathy; and the minister concerned coldly said — he would inquire!
But all those present could see that this inquiry would be the last thing that he would deem it worth his while to make.
It is strange that with the present state of Ireland before their eyes the whole of the public men of Italy should be as indifferent as they are to the perpetual irritation of all the industrious classes at the hands of the municipalities and their organisation of spies and penalties. But indifferent they are: whether Bismarck approve of their Greek policy, or Gambetta do not oppose their doings at Tunis is all they think about; the suffering of a few million of their own people is too small a thing to catch their attention; they think like Molière’s doctor— ‘Un home mort n’est qu’un homme mort, et ne fait point de conséquence, mais un formalité negligée porte un notable préjudice à tout le corps de médecins.’
No one can accuse me of any political prejudices. My writings have alternately been accused of a reactionary conservatism and a dangerous socialism, so that I may, without presumption, claim to be impartial; I love conservatism when it means the preservation of beautiful things; I love revolution when it means the destruction of vile ones.
What I despise in the pseudo liberalism of the age is that it has become only the tyranny of narrow minds vested under high‐sounding phrases, and the deification of a policeman. I would give alike to a Capucin as to a Communist, to a Mormon as to a Monk, the free choice of his opinions and mode of life. But this true liberty is nowhere to be found in Europe, and still less to be found in America; and this pseudo liberty meddles with every phase of private life, and would dictate the rule of every simple act.
Every noble‐hearted theorist of a future of freedom has died in heart‐broken disillusion; from the Girondists of the past century to those, who, with high hopes, shouted in chorus to Silvio Pellico the Bianca croce di Savoia! Thousands of gallant and goodly lives are thrown away like water in the effort to create a fair Utopia of free action and untroubled peace; and all that, in the end, is born of their sacrifice is a horde of weazels and of leeches, who suck the body of the nations dry; vermin who bear upon their backs a swarm of smaller parasites as pestilent as themselves.
Gianbattista Niccolini, walking with Centofanti one day in Florence, shouted to two monks:
‘Go and get a spade and dig, you good‐for‐noughts!’
This is what, nowadays, the poor man — laborious and honest — seeing the idle eaters of the public funds swarming in and out of every public office, every municipality, every custom house, mutters in his soul against the accursed impiegato.
It is a change of masters, it is true, but it is no deliverance. It is the old tale of Jeannot’s knife; blade and handle have both been changed, but it is the same knife still, and here it cuts the hand that forged it.
Yet again one of the deepest sins of the State against the public is the Government lottery.
It is difficult to imagine a more absurd anomaly, a more entirely indefensible contradiction, than the severity exercised by the State towards all private games and street games, and the selfishness with which it continues to be itself the centre of the most demoralising system of gaming that can be devised for the ruin of the people. The interference of the State with private gambling is carried to an inquisitive and impertinent excess; yet at the same time, for sake of profit, the Government carries on a gigantic machinery more fatal in its effects on the populace than any Casino like Monte Carlo. In the Casino it may be said that none are victims save those who voluntarily seek the pernicious attraction, and they are most of them people, who, if they could not play there, would play at home. Paris baccarat is ten times worse than Monte Carlo’s roulette; but the public lottery is ten times worse than Paris baccarat, because the State comes out and seeks the poor man as he takes his hard‐earned wages, descends amidst the populace, wooes, entices, enervates, intoxicates, and beggars them.
‘Ah! the State is a clever one,’ said a working man to me the other day. ‘It sells everything else to the Hebrews, but it takes good care to keep the lottery itself.�
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And this is true; everything else, down to the rights of Octroi at the gates of cities, are sold to the Jew syndicates, but the Government retains the lottery; and it may be safely affirmed that so long as it does retain this vile thing, so long will the sin and the sorrow of the multitudes lie at its doors. Not merely does it foster the fatal superstition which makes the study of ‘lucky numbers’ and ‘dream omens’ the sole thought of the people, but in the rare cases where the poor man wins, the sudden delirium of riches has an effect like poison on him, and he spends all in a brief summer phrenzy to perish afterwards in beggary or a madhouse. The lottery takes all the earnings of the labouring classes in all the cities, usurps all their mind and hopes, keeps them for ever in that fever of longing which is in itself a moral disease, and encourages in them alike the lowest greed and the most enervating indolence.
No one seems to dare to lift up a voice against it, but until a minister shall arise who will destroy it, the nation will have no faithful public servant.
I would sooner see a Casino like Monte Carlo in every city of Italy, if thus the lottery could be abolished, than I would see as I do, daily and hourly, the legalised publicity of this accursed destroyer of the people allowed all over the land, whilst boys playing morra for coppers are seized by the police!
The system, too, to which I alluded above, of selling the Octroi and other public taxes to individuals or companies, is productive of evils which it would be impossible without volumes of statistics, fully to describe. A grasping speculator, or group of spectators, buys up the rights of taxation over a city or a province, and makes the most out of the speculation that can be made. I ask the reader to think over for a moment all that this implies, all that this permits.
Yet who speaks of all these terrible and frightful evils — evils by which the country is impost‐laden till it sinks like the over‐weighted camel?