THE POLICY OF THE CARTEL
Rural demagogy!

Our friend and collaborator Compère-Morel proposed yesterday in the Chamber to tax according to their real profit the agricultural owners "whose total amount of annual gross receipts exceeds one hundred thousand francs". Nothing more legitimate. In the current state of affairs, the agricultural schedule of the income tax does not provide the sixtieth part of the total product of this tax! In 1923: 25 million exactly out of 2,800! From 1918 to 1923, the industrialists and the merchants paid more than four billion, the workers more than a billion, the farmers less than one hundred million! Compère-Morel pointed out as one of the humiliating paradoxes of this regime the fact that, in the Gard, while an owner is exempt from the tax, his worker is subject to it!
The socialist deputy specified, on the other hand, that it was not a question of striking all peasants indiscriminately, but rather the big profiteers of the land, who number several thousand. One of the latter, for a net profit of 52,000 francs, paid four francs in tax. Now a worker wrote to me that, for a salary of 8,410 francs received by him in 1923, he has 135 francs in tax to pay. It is enough to compare the figures to reveal all the injustice of the current tax system.

Now, the Compère-Morel proposal was rejected. There were a good hundred "left-wing" deputies who put their misunderstood interests! of representatives of rural people before their republican convictions. The principle of equality before tax which they claim required a different attitude from them. Following the well-known formula, they relied on the principle until it weakened. We regret this. They have thus opened in the Cartel without any excuse, let us repeat, a fairly large breach. Mr. Romier, to whom the importance of this vote has not escaped, claims that the amendment of Compère-Morel had as its aim "to introduce the class struggle into agriculture"! As if class conflicts depended on an article of the finance law! As if one of the surest ways to poison them, to exasperate them, was not, on the contrary, to create in the nation categories of privileged people!

The small farmers, whose interests are not in solidarity with those of the large landowners, will not be grateful to the failing republicans for this concession to the worst demagogy.

L.-O. FROSSARD.