Paiderastia

“ Whoever cannot become or remain rich, whoever has entered the cavern of misfortune, must make up his mind to pay in proportion to his poverty: Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch' entrate.
Taxation, then, police,—henceforth we shall not separate these two ideas,—is a new source of pauperism; taxation aggravates the subversive effects of the preceding antinomies,—division of labor, machinery, competition, monopoly. It attacks the laborer in his liberty and in his conscience, in his body and in his soul, by parasitism, vexations, the frauds which it prompts, and the punishments which follow them. ”

“ When you come to consider that issue you must view the claim for reparations as you would any ordinary debt. You must make up your mind whether you wish to ruin the debtor or to recover the cash. If there are no sufficient realisable assets, [Pg 142] then, if you want your money, you must keep your debtor alive. If you want beef from your cow you must forgo the milk. If your object is to destroy your debtor, you press for payment of more than he can be reasonably expected to pay, and then seize his house, his lands, and his chattels, whether they can be disposed of or not. ”

“ The peasant resembles his ass, refusing to go without being beaten, and, although in this he may appear stupid, he is clever. For the collector, being responsible, "naturally inclines to an increase of the assessment on prompt payers to the advantage of the negligent. Hence the prompt payer becomes, in his turn, negligent and, although with money in his chest, he allows the process to go on."5227 Summing all up, he calculates that the process, even if expensive, costs less than extra taxation, and of the two evils he chooses the least. ”

“ Words came from his lips as though it hurt him to speak. "I have forced money out of people. I am a tax-gatherer. What can I do?" Everyone there had been cheated by tax collectors.
"Turn your whole life back toward God. Never again force people to pay more money than is just."
Several other people had joined the tax collector. "What must I do?" asked a soldier.
"Never take money from people by force. Never blackmail. Be content with your pay." He looked at the group before him and said: "Let every man of you who owns two garments share with the person who has none at all. ”

“ Hartell, but paid too late."
We trust such evil consequences as Margery suffered from the want of punctuality in the employer's payment do not often occur, but they are not without a parallel. Is it not very common for ladies, far more from thoughtlessness than meditated injustice, to delay the payment of wages? Is there not a culpable inconsiderateness of the rights as well as necessities of a large class, including tradespeople and humble creditors of every sort, in that common reply to their demands, "Call again?" ”

“ Come and work for me as you work for other people; forget that I did you a service which my purse never so much as discovered, and thus force me to be your debtor, since you will accept, in satisfaction of an irreparable outrage, the most paltry of reparations—money. ”

“ Of course, he can't pay more then he borrows, though he agrees to; and so someday the banker, who lent him the money, metaphorically gobbles him up, robs him of all he has got and makes him a pauper, when he will perhaps finish by imprisoning him for vagrancy. Then the officers, who run this landlords' and bankers' government, want paying, as they are not producers themselves, and that makes another big hole in the worker's product, which we call taxation. ”

“ Your prices, signore, would make a cow weep.”
“Then name me a price,” insists the proprietor. “Come, name it and let me hear.”
“Sixty lire!” shouts the customer defiantly.
“Sixty lire!” wails the proprietor. “Presence of the Devil, signore, I paid five hundred lire for that object. I am a poor man, signore, and the thief of a Government takes everything away in taxes—the luxury tax and the tax for the wounded and the export tax. One must live. Come, signore, give me five hundred and fifty lire and take it.”
“Madonna!” cries the customer in a rage. ”

“ Some of the worst villains of our cities are the employers of these women. They beat them down to the last penny and try to cheat them out of that. The woman must deposit a dollar or two before she gets the garments to work on. When the work is done it is sharply inspected, the most insignificant flaws picked out, and the wages refused and sometimes the dollar deposited not given back. The Women's Protective Union reports a case where one of the poor souls, finding a place where she could get more wages, resolved to change employers, and went to get her pay for work done. ”

“ The national aversion to borrowing is courted by one, and its aversion to a land tax, by the other. Our system of revenue, they truly say, is at present composed of duties and loans, and they propose to exchange it for a system of excises. They ought in justice to have said for one of excises and loans; for two bad modes of providing revenue, instead of the best which can probably be devised. I summon all experience to testify, whether the mode of obtaining revenue by excises, has diminished or extended the mode of obtaining it by loans. ”

“ But if it be true that the thread-mill would not exist but for the tax, or that the operatives would not get such good wages but for the tax, then how can we form a judgment as to whether the protective system is wise or not unless we call to mind all the seamstresses, washer-women, servants, factory-hands, saleswomen, teachers, and laborers' wives and daughters, scattered in the garrets and tenements of great cities and in cottages all over the country, who are paying the tax which keeps the mill going and pays the extra wages? ”

“ They will collect all duties until indemnity has been paid.'
"And you, you blockheads and asses, whose grandmothers were geese—do you know what this means?" the merchant went on. "It means that the United States will collect a huge sum of money—that they will collect it once. But it means also that the scoundrel Alfaro will use this condition—which he himself has brought about—as an excuse for collecting it a dozen times, as he has done before. As an excuse for more taxes, and yet more. It is you who will pay! Will pay while your wives and little ones starve, as others have starved." ”

“ As all loans were so payable, the accumulations of age, and the inheritance of orphans dwindled. So, too, did the earnings of the wageworker. In order to avoid the losses from a depreciating standard of value, resort was had by working men to 'store pay,' and here they were generally cheated. Trustees and executors, who had money in their hands which belonged to other people, and who saw how things were going, often postponed the payment on frivolous pretext, since each delay enabled them to settle their accounts with less value, thus devouring widows' houses. ”

“ Again, the probability of the girl marrying increases on all sides the difficulties encountered in raising standards alike of work and of wages. Bound up with direct payment are those indirect elements of remuneration or deduction from remuneration covered by length of working-hours and by sanitary conditions, since whatever saps the girl's energy or undermines her health, whether overwork, foul air, or unsafe or too heavy or overspeeded machinery, forms an actual deduction from her true wages, besides being a serious deduction from the wealth-store, the stock of well-being, of the community. ”

“ Now what worries me is, why should the State keep Courts going for men of this class? The only creditor in that list for whom one can have the least sympathy is the doctor, and the National Insurance Act has now put him on a cash basis, so that in a list taken to-day he would not appear so often. It is clear from these figures that at a cost to the general body of taxpayers you are encouraging a bad class of parasite traders to choke the growth of thrift among the working classes. ”

“ By the payment of this debt she would leave herself nearly destitute. The flight and terror of the citizens would deprive her of employment. Want of food was an immediate and inevitable evil which the payment of this sum would produce. Was it just to incur this evil? To retain the means of luxurious gratification would be wrong, but to bereave herself and her father of bare subsistence was surely no dictate of duty.
It is true the penalty of non-payment was always in the landlord's hands. ”

“ The excise, which was a favourite resource of Whig financiers, he had designated as a hateful tax. He had railed against the commissioners of excise in language so coarse that they had seriously thought of prosecuting him. He had with difficulty been prevented from holding up the Lord Privy Seal by name as an example of the meaning of the word “renegade.”’ A pension he had defined as pay given to a state hireling to betray his country; a pensioner as a slave of state hired by a stipend to obey a master. ”

“ Do the ratepayers ever think that the seven millions of annual poor rate would in one single year place every recipient of Poor Law relief, old and young, man, woman and child, on the shores of America?—would pay all expenses, and leave them one or two pounds their pockets to begin the world with? ”

“ That in some—where, too, the directors were business men—large sums were improperly paid for land, for compensation, for consequential damages, for fancy prospects, and other unjust demands under various names. These sums being immorally obtained, is it right that the public should pay the interest on them? Is it just that the working man should forego his trifling luxury to meet them? Is it fair that the artisan should be deprived of his occasional trip, or that the frequenter of the rail should pay an additional tax? ”

“ It is because they have so honorable thoughts, that although they see that the pay is drawn now from the king and so punctually, yet with the new system that has been ordered, not a single one of them has ever wished to concur in it, although they are perishing of hunger, and besides have nothing to do except to suffer themselves to come to submit in order to receive pay. ”

“ I pay people because I love what they do, and so do you. We pay – and would be happy to pay more, if we didn’t think that someone else was in the way – for things of beauty and utility all the time.
What we are losing is the ability to force people to pay. ”

“ A cage of jabbering monkeys is not a more amusing spectacle than some gangs of Italian laborers receiving their month's pay.
The pay-department can be made very systematic, and to promote economy and accuracy it is absolutely necessary that it should be. The Paymaster is not simply a medium through whom wages are distributed. He may be one of the most important officers of his company, and ferret out frauds and dishonesty which otherwise might never be discovered. He knows all the men, and they, of course, know him. ”

“ That body, instead of gladly accepting under proper arrangements, passed a series of abstract resolutions, to the effect "that this Board conceives that the payment by boards of guardians of wages in return for labour to poor persons chargeable or seeking to become chargeable upon the rates, or the holding themselves responsible for the providing of such labour for wages—thus impairing the self-reliance of the poor—is opposed to the whole spirit and intent of the Poor Law, and it is inexpedient both upon social and economical grounds." ”

“ Among the modes of squeezing are forced labor, doubling or trebling the amount of a legitimate tax, exacting bribes in cases of litigation, forced loans, etc. If a man is reported to have saved a little money, an official asks for the loan of it. ”

“ Loan delinquency and the associated penalty interest rate, therefore, often bring about the reduction or elimination of bonus payments and, in extreme cases, the withholding of a portion of regular pay. Application of the more severe sanctions entails a serious deterioration of the economic organization's finances that adversely affects its production program. ”

“ Every penny bestowed that tends to render the condition of the pauper more eligible than that of an independent labourer is a bounty on indolence and vice. One further primary condition of a sound system of relief we considered was, that the relief given should be entire—not partial relief Any partial relief, any relief in aid of wages, had, as respects the able-bodied, an inevitable tendency to substitute parish doles for wages, and to lower wages, and to destroy the independence of the labourer. ”

“ Nothing could be more unwise or unjust than the exactions of the creditors. Men must live; if not paid, they perforce pay themselves; and thus, of every hundred piastres, hardly thirty find their way into the treasury. ”

“ Case after case has come before my personal observation where employers, content to make a small margin of profit or no profit at all, but only sufficient to cover standing charges and prime costs, have deliberately decided, when faced with certain loss owing to the grinding burden of taxation, rather than embark any new capital in extending their businesses, or in adding to them some new branch of industry which would [239] have provided employment for many men, to put their money on bank deposit or invest it in gilt-edged securities. ”

“ It is useless to mince matters, Pat—we are in a fix, and have got to make the most of it. We belong to a secret league, whose object is to resist paying the taxes imposed by government upon miners, and hearing that you were with the government, we determined to clip your claws, and prevent you from doing mischief. If your store had taken fire, we might have made a few pounds by plunder, but as for receiving five pounds, or any money for the work, it's all sham, and Pat knows it. We talked the matter over with a dozen or so, and agreed to do the business. ”