A Village Commune (Volume 2) - Softcover

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1881. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... 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, hidos 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 ...