without endeavouring to obtain competitive offers; the Commissioner actually allowed, on his own authority, a further discount of 8 per cent. It appears also that the co-operative with which the deal was made was a fictitious one, and that the· material actually went to a well-known industrialist. General Pizzone, inspector of army corps at Milan, who exposed the scandal, was attacked on the evening after the exposure by a secretary of the railway Commissariat. Revocation of the Peasants' Right to the Lands Occupied. The decree of January 11, 1923, abolished the grants which had been made to the ptasants of those lands, belonging to the latifundia of the -great landowners, of which, over large parts of Italy, they had taken forcible possession. In Sicily alone, the Bank of Sicily had financed nearly 100,000 acres of occupied land, granting credit to the amount of 700,000 lire for the payment of octroi duties, five· million. lire for collective purchases, and, for these and other purposes, a total sum of 34 millions, virtually without incurring any loss at all. V.-LABOUR POLICY. Workers' Organisations. In many parts of Italy, · especially in rural districts, working class organisations which are not under Fascist control have no possibility of existence. In the large towns and in certain districts in which the Fascist monopoly is less absolute, the organisations still exist, but enjoy only a very restricted freedom of action. (See the chronicle of facts, in Part IV.) Nowhere can meetings of- any importance be held, still less public ones. In general agreements and pacts concerning labour conditions are impossible ; conditions are laid down by the Fascist Corporations and imposed on the workers, even where nine-tenths of the workers organised by the Corporations sti11remain members of other organisations. Biblioteca Gino Bianco ◄
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