Oh, These Taxes!

There is no deliverance, no rescue from these taxes. We in the villages are already groaning under them and wondering whether someone is not inventing them on purpose, someone who wants to send our man out into the world with a beggar's bag altogether. It is simply enough to make a man renounce his land and his house… Truly, there are not fingers enough to count all the kinds of taxes: for the commune, for the district sejmik, the land tax, the tax on property in general, the state tax, and on top of the state tax there is compulsory insurance as well! And besides that, people say, we shall soon have to pay some kind of voivodeship tax. What galls most of all now is this insurance. They have set such an assessment for the year as nobody dreamed of before the great war. For is it a joke?! Our villager would have to sell some twenty poods of rye in order to pay 70–75 million in insurance for the year. And where is one to get so much rye, and in the spring, this spring of ours, so late?! And they are hounding us to pay the insurance without fail by 1 June, all at once. If a man had any spare pood of rye (and who had a spare one!), he sold it long ago for the earlier taxes, or to buy a little straw to feed the cow or the horse until the grass comes, and now suddenly — pay the insurance. And the devil knows what to do. One might as well put a rope on the cow and drag her to the market. It seems the landlords get it too, as if they also moan and keep putting off the payment of their taxes, but in the end nothing ill befalls them — they sell some timber and there is money for taxes; but where is our brother, the villager in his homespun coat, to get money when there are no earnings anywhere, and even if he does break his back for a week or so at some work in the forest, he truly cannot earn enough there for his daily food?

What a grief has come this spring! By God, I do not know whether we shall overcome it!

Our editorial office receives a mass of these complaints about the burden of taxes on our village, which has not yet recovered from the war and the general impoverishment. Printing for the time being, for lack of space in the paper, only this one letter on the matter of taxes, we inform our readers that 1 June is not the last date for paying the insurance this year. On the basis of information we received from the Dyrekcja Ubezpieczeń Wzajemnych in Vilnia, we inform you that poor villagers may pay the insurance after 1 June as well, and that a farmer's property will not be sold for non-payment of the insurance by 1 June. Besides that, it is quite certain that the insurance assessed for this year will be divided into at least 2 instalments.

As for the immoderate burden of taxes on the village in general, here we can do nothing to help; one can only say: advise yourselves!