kerosene, and matches—is reported to have amounted to seventy-five per cent of the value of the articles taxed. On the other hand, the Russian customs duties in the same year averaged but thirty-four per cent of the import value of the foreign goods imported—a circumstance that may find an explanation in the fact that a large proportion of imports of Russia are in the nature of machinery or crude materials for industrial use or elaboration, and apart from this the requirements of the masses in Russia for foreign products are comparatively small.
In Egypt until quite recently, as has been already shown (see previous chapter on The Tax Experiences of Egypt), the annual exactions from its peasantry—the fellahs—under the name of taxation produced an extremity of want which closely bordered on starvation.
In Italy, which in ancient times was regarded, as it is in fact to-day, potentially the richest country in Europe, and although its present Government can not fairly be characterized as despotic, its agriculture is burdened with state exactions that are reported as absorbing from one third to one half of the value of its annual product. The existing debt of the country, created largely by enormous military and naval expenditures, entails an annual interest charge of about $3.75 per head of its population.[1]
Another disastrous interference with the prosperity of the state is the system of taxing all business enterprises, after they have been established three years, at rates which in some cases swamp the profits. And in addition to such disturbing elements, there is undoubtedly an all-pervading evasion for a consideration of all forms of taxation by the functionaries whose business it is
- ↑ A national tax on movable (personal) property—the ricchezza mobile—is levied on the poorest of the Italian people; and often the bed has to be sold or the saucepans pawned to pay it.
The gate tax, dazio consumo, best known to English ears as octroi, which has been the especial object of the Sicilian fury, is a curse to the whole land. Nothing can pass the gates of any city or town without paying this odious and inquisitorial impost. Strings of cattle and of carts wait outside from midnight to morning, the poor beasts lying down in the winter mud and summer dust. Half the life of the country people is consumed in this senseless, cruel stoppage and struggle at the gates; a poor old woman can not take an egg her hen has laid, or a bit of spinning she has done, through the gates without paying for them The wretched live poultry wait half a day and a whole night cooped up in stifling crates or hung neck downward in a bunch on a nail; the oxen and calves are kept without food three or four days before their passage through the gates, that they may weigh less when put in the scales.
By this insensate method of taxation all the food taken into the cities and towns is deteriorated. The prating and interfering officers of hygiene do not attend to this, the greatest danger of all to health that is, inflamed and injured animal and fowl carcasses sent into the markets. The municipalities exact the last centime from their prey; whole families are ruined and disappear through the exactions of their communes, who persist in squeezing what is already drained dry as a bone.—Fortnightly Review, 1894.
