150 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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 im- 

 ported 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.* 



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 fami- 

 lies 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- 



