There is no octroi.
Would it be believed that Naples is surrounded by a towering Chinese
wall, miles upon miles of it, crowned with a complicated apparatus of
alarm-bells and patrolled night and day by a horde of doganieri armed
to the teeth - lest some peasant should throw a bundle of onions into the
sacred precincts of the town without paying the duty of half a farthing?
No nation with any sense of humour would endure this sort of thing.
Every one resents the airs of this army of official loafers who infest
the land, and would be far better employed themselves in planting onions
upon the many miles of Italy which now lie fallow; the results of the
system have been shown to be inadequate, "but," as my friend the Roman
deputy once asked me, "if we dismiss these fellows from their job, how
are we to employ them?"
"Nothing is simpler," I replied. "Enrol them into the Town Council of
Naples. It already contains more employes than all the government
offices of London put together; a few more will surely make no difference?"
"By Bacchus," he cried, "you foreigners have ideas! We could dispose of
ten or fifteen thousand of them, at least, in the way you suggest. I'll
make a note of that, for our next session."
And so he did.
But the Municipio of Naples, though extensive, is a purely local
charity, and I question whether its inmates will hear of any one save
their own cousins and brothers-in-law figuring as colleagues in office.
Every attempt at innovation in agriculture, as in industry, is forthwith
discouraged by new and subtle impositions, which lie in wait for the
enterprising Italian and punish him for his ideas. There is, of course,
a prohibitive duty on every article or implement manufactured abroad;
there is the octroi, a relic of medisevalism, the most unscientific,
futile, and vexatious of taxes; there are municipal dues to be paid on
animals bought and animals sold, on animals kept and animals killed, on
milk and vine-props and bricks, on timber for scaffolding and lead and
tiles and wine - on every conceivable object which the peasant produces
or requires for his existence. And one should see the faces of the
municipal employes who extort these tributes. God alone knows from
what classes of the populace they are recruited; certain it is that
their physiognomy reflects their miserable calling. One can endure the
militarism of Germany and the bureaucracy of Austria; but it is
revolting to see decent Italian countryfolk at the mercy of these
uncouth savages, veritable cave-men, whose only intelligible expression
is one of malice striving to break through a crust of congenital
cretinism.
We hear much of the great artists and speculative philosophers of old
Italy. The artists of modern Italy are her bureaucrats who design and
elaborate the taxes; her philosophers, the peasants who pay them.
