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Their extravagance was due incompetence, to their professed contempt for the bourgeois classes which were expected to pay for everything and also to dishonesty. Things reached this pitch with the culpable connivence of the Government. If some Prefect denounced these irregular practises, he was ordered not to trouble about them; if the exceptional seriousness of the facts or the complete insolvency of the local administration rendered the intervention of the State imperative, the official reports, instead of being transmitted to the public prosecutor, were jealously hidden away. These are not fantastic stories, but facts which have occurred very near to us, viz. in Milan. The Milan municipality ostentatiously violated the law, arbitrarily indulged in unlimited expenses subsidized party congresses, paid for electoral propaganda out of municipal funds, created jobs for Socialists; in one comme of the the province of Milan gratuities were given to the employees on the undertaking that half of the amount was to be paid over to the Socialist club; the local political authorities called the attention of the Government to these irregularities, but the order came from Rome to hush the
