Here’s a tax resistance campaign I can really sympathize with, as a home brewer. If the tax collector ever comes after me and wants to put a tax stamp on my booze, there’s gonna be a fight.
From the Dundee Evening Telegraph:
French “Passive Resisters.”
The Taxing of Privately Distilled Spirits.
Paris, . France, Like England, has her “passive resisters,” but the resistance has nothing whatever to do with an Education Act or denominational teaching.
The law passed a year or two ago making the privately distilled spirit (for home use) of peasants and wine growers subject to a tax has never been really accepted by those against whom it was directed, and the resisters have had the connivance and co-operation of the local authorities.
Two days since the tax gatherers in the village of Auxon, near Vesoul, attempted to penetrate into the houses of private distillers for the purpose of assessment. For this they demanded the co-operation of the Mayor. The Mayor categorically refused to give it. The men of the law then applied to the Deputy-Mayor, who replied—“I am here to act in the Mayor’s absence. He is not absent. I see him on his doorstep. I refuse to act.”
A crowd, of course, had collected, and the Mayor, of course, made a speech. He appealed to the tax gatherers, in their own interest, not to excite the hostility of his (the Mayor’s) gallant townsmen. The chief tax gatherer then replied in these terms–“It is well. We go. But the last word will remain with the law. We shall return.”
And without doubt they will, and trouble is likely to ensue. –“Morning Leader.”
