The Litchfield County Post

From Blackwood's Magazine.

GREECE.
Continued.

The Greek insurrection assumes to us an aspect of loftier importance from those considerations. Whatever might be our sympathies with the fortunes of a brave and unhappy people, striving with their naked hands to tear off the manacles that have cut them to the soul, we feel a still stronger interest in this generous struggle, from its giving the signal of mightier changes perhaps throughout the whole extent of the civilized world. It may be extinguished, and the time, which shall yet surely come, may be thus deferred; but if it should succeed, it will have made the only permanent aggression on the fabric of the Turkish power, the only permanent inroad into that great interdicted desert, it will have stricken the first blow on the Talisman on which is engraved the spell which has for ages kept the Ottoman throne inaccessible to the hostility of human nature.

It is impossible that this godless, corrupt, and infidel kingdom, should be tolerated but for the purposes of punishing. There have been other criminals, revolters from the faith, abusers of the benevolence of Heaven, on whom the Ottoman has been brought as the locust, to destroy the living vegetation of their strength and prosperity. The pestilence and famine are the inferior agents of wrath, but the time for the cessation of punishment may be as deeply determined as for its infliction; and then comes the retribution of the punisher. Human violence was used in the whole course of the Jewish Annals for the castigation of the crimes of Israel. The Assyrian idolator was made great for his day by the fall of the chosen people. But when the hour of deliverance was ordained, there was ordained with it the ruin of the instrument of slavery and blood, and Assyria was cast from her golden supremacy, and Babylon was condemned into the haunt of the vulture and the lion forever!

The Geographical description of Greece adopted by the Provisional Government, is as follows:—

INHABITANTS.
Total, 2,350,000

Of this population but about one third can be called original Greeks. The rest are Albanians and Turks, with some thousands of Franks and Jews. The mountainous regions had never been completely reduced under the Turks. The horse and scymitar had made them masters of the plain, they became feudal possessors of the territory under the usual tenure of military service to the Sultan, and held the remaining Greeks as cultivators and serfs of the soil. But multitudes had retreated to the freedom and security of the mountain tracts, and as the Turkish chain became heavier, multitudes flung it off and flew to their free countrymen. The vacancy produced by this flight was partially filled up by forced or voluntary accessions of Christian inhabitants from Albania and Bulgaria. About two hundred years ago, a large emigration of Christian Albanians entered Botia, Attica, and Argolis, where their language is still retained. The island of Hydra, the seat of the commercial and naval enterprise of Greece, was peopled by this race, and in whatever quarter they settled, they have been hardy, active and brave.

Another multitude of original Greeks had passed over into Asia Minor during the last half century. They fled from the increased oppression of the Turks, yet they passed under a Turkish Government; but it was that of the Kara Osman Oglu family, the singularly mild viceroys of the valleys of the Hemus and Caicus.

There was but little severity in the established tributes of the Greeks under even the European Turks. The mode of apportioning the rent had been adopted from the usages of the Greek Empire. A seventh of the produce was set apart for the land tax. The landlord received half the remainder, or a larger portion, according to his supply of seed, stock, and agricultural tools. The capitation tax, however exposed to vexations in the collecting, was comparatively trivial; it was levied on every Christian, but it seldom amounted to more than two pounds sterling for each family. But the real grievances remained behind; the Turk was privileged to compel the Greek peasant to sell his produce for the public use, of either the Sultan, or the local government, at whatever price the mercy of his tyrant pleased. There were perpetual demands of contributions in money or kind; soldiers were quartered on them; they were compelled to supply labour for the public works. This system of harassing and plunder was carried through the whole government, and the peasants were reduced to the lowest privation. In all the conquests the inhabitants of the open country pay a heavy price for the luxuriance of the plain, and in the levels of Thessaly and Euboea, Boeotia and Macedonia, the peasantry lived under the sword. In the mountain districts, the Morea, and the country south of Mount Etna, the Turks were more reluctant to settle, and the religious houses retained a portion of their former lands. A curious tenure preserved the rights of some other Greeks even in the more exposed territory. It had been the old custom of the Asiatic sovereigns to set apart cities and districts for the peculiar provision of their queens or households. The custom had been retained by the Sultans, and large districts of the more fertile parts of Greece belonged to the Sultanas, or to the Harem in general, or even to the Mosques. The tenantry in possession were comparatively secure, and the exactions were comparatively mild.—The gentleness of female influence was felt even in this system of tyranny; and the complaints of the Greek who supplied the toilets of the Harem were seldom neglected by his imperial mistresses. The Greek of the Islands was still less subject to injury. In the Aegean, excepting in portions of the Islands nearest the Asiatic shore, Rhodes, Cos, and Lesbos, the Greeks paid only the land-tax, and capitation. But on the whole this memorable people was in the most distressed state of any Christian nation. Neither life nor property was their own. Their government was tyranny, their revenue was extortion, their law was the sword; they lived under the heel of a barbarous domination, haughty from its very ignorance, and merciless alike by its nature and its creed.

In the freedom and security of our country, we possibly cannot conceive the long misery of life passed under the wild caprice and perpetual irritation of Turkish tyranny—the exposure of the deepest and dearest interests of our blood and being to brutal passion or malignant power—the bitter and constant fear that the fruits of a life of labour would be sacrificed to the avarice of some insolent slave, raised into sudden authority by his superior villany, and sent forth to live by plunder, and tread down every hope of honor and prosperity in the land. God forbid, we say in the sincerity of our souls, that this should last, even if the subject nation were but a step above the beasts that perish; even if there was no seed of manliness among them—if, in the long series of ages, they had never given proof of a noble thought, or an action worthy of human nature. God forbid that man, bearing his image, however humiliated, and defiled with the dust of slavery, should not at length clear away the stain; that the day of oppression should not have an end, and the lash and the fetter at length cease to resound in this mighty dungeon; or still more, that England, the very throne of Christianity and Freedom, should not be the first to command this merciless desolation of gallant hearts and Christian faith to be at an end; and if her remonstrances should fail, in the majesty of justice, and by the high privilege of her power, delegated for such things, finally wring the scourge from the hand of the godless oppressor.

But that this unfortunate people are eminently worthy of the interference and interest of enlightened Europe, we have evidences of the most sufficient kind. Of this order is Col. Leake, who, from his official residence, his professional rank, and his peculiar study of the people and language, is undeniable authority. This officer tells us, in his late very interesting Memoir,* that "though the condition of the peasant is, on the whole, miserable, he is in general industrious, much attached to his family, anxious for the education of his children, and equal, if not superior, in intelligence, to the peasantry of the most civilized countries of Europe."

He proceeds to tell us, that this distinguished characteristic of the ancient Greeks is retained by their descendants of every condition in a degree so striking as to attract the attention of all strangers, even of those most disposed to think harshly of the Greeks; that among the most uncultivated and ignorant of this unhappy people, even in those provinces where the Turkish tyranny would have been almost enough to extinguish the heart and understanding of man, the stranger is forced to acknowledge the "curiosity, ingenuity, keenness, and elocution of their famous forefathers, and the natural effect of which upon the present race was an extreme impatience of their present condition." "Not a traveller from Europe could pass without exciting the hope that some interference in their favor was in contemplation; and he never failed to hear from them many bitter reproaches against us for allowing our fellow-Christians to remain enslaved under the yoke of infidels."

Col. Leake attributes a large portion of the misrepresentation of the Greek character to the route pursued by the ordinary tourists.—Individuals accustomed to the indulgencies of civilized countries are suddenly plunged into the privations and inconveniences of a depressed and poor state of society; or they come with romantic notions borrowed from antiquity; or to avoid the common hazards of travel through the mountain countries, where the true people are to be alone found, they make a party of pleasure through the beaten track of Athens, the islands, the Asiatic coast, the plain of Troy and Constantinople; a road

*Historical outline of the Greek Revolution By Wm. M. Leake.

Eastern Hellas, containing	-	-	80,000
Western Hellas,	-	-	70,000
The Morea,	-	-	450,000
Crete and the Islands,	-	-	550,000
Epirus,	-	-	400,000
Thessaly,	-	-	300,000
Macedonia,	-	-	700,000

where, of course, travellers are as much the accustomed prey as upon other frequented roads, and where extortion is the natural lesson.

"Their journey is concluded before they have acquired a sufficient knowledge of the language to form any impartial estimate of the national character, and they come in contact chiefly with those classes upon whom the long subjection to the Turks has had the greatest effect; such as persons in authority under the government, or otherwise in Turkish employ—servants interpreters, the lower order of traders, and generally the inhabitants of those towns in which the Turkish population has a great preponderance of numbers."

"It is obviously not in those situations, but in the more unfrequented islands, and on the continent of European Greece, where the Turks do not form a tenth part of the population, that the inquiry ought to be made, whether any of the ancient talents and virtues of the Greeks have survived the centuries of Mussulman oppression which supervened upon the debasement caused by Byzantine despotism, weakness and superstition. In such an inquiry it would be further necessary to distinguish between the inhabitants of the plains and those of the mountains; for those two classes have been placed in very different circumstances since the establishment of the Ottoman power in Greece."

The Turkish oppression has been so directly the source of the chief defects in the character of the Greek of our day, that, in exact proportion as that fatal influence is enfeebled, so rises the national character. Its nature is elastic, and springs up even in every momentary removal of the pressure; but its true displays are to be found where the Turk dares not come. The most remarkable contrast to the inhabitants of the plains is to be found in those Islands of the Aegean, "where there are no Turkish inhabitants;" and in the mountainous parts of Crete, of Laconia, Arcadia, Etolia, Locris, Epirus, Thessaly, and Macedonia. Here the Greeks bear "the most striking resemblance," in both their virtues and their vices, to their illustrious ancestors—"industrious, hardy, enterprising, heroic; living on little, or lovers of wine and gaiety, as the occasion prompts; sanguine, quick, ingenious, imitative." The picture has its dark side— "Vain, inconstant, envious, treacherous, and turbulent." This picture is not from the hand of an enthusiast; the stains are too faithfully marked. But we must remember, that these defects would be the natural qualities of any people leading the distracted and uncertain life of the Greeks—even in his strongest place of security, pent up amid wild tracts of barren country, shut out from general communication, condemned to the habits of the hunter and the marauder, liable to annual inroads of a merciless enemy, and from his cradle to his grave, either the spoil or the antagonists of the oppressor. Poverty, suspicion, loneliness—the inclemency of the weather—a life of hazard—flight or attack—what original constitution of virtue could have attained its true stature? There is not a national character under heaven that would not have hardened and darkened under this perpetual rudeness of fortune. That the Greek retains any qualities entitling him to rank among men, is the phenomenon—the powerful evidence of what illustrious qualities he may yet show forth, when misery and shame shall cover him no more, and he shall be called to take his armed stand in the great field, where nations struggle for more than the glory of the sword.

Providence has commanded that various climates shall bring forth various fruits out of that vast treasure of fertility and bounty which it has laid up for the enjoyment of man. It has commanded that among the races of man, there shall be a variety of intellectual powers for the general good. Why should it not have followed up this palpable law of beneficence as far as nations, and appointed those distinctions among the mightier masses of society, which have been found essential to the system of individual communities? Why shall not the nation and the land be made for each other—The dweller on the shore of the ocean be gifted with an innate spirit of adventure, with hardihood of frame, steady intrepidity, and the love of the storm—The dweller in the bosom of a great fertile continent be gifted with the sturdy strength of agriculture, the sober diligence, the unambitious love of home—The dweller in the land, that was to be the first step in the advance of the Eastern colonies to fill the solitudes of the West, the splendid school from which the arts of Europe were to rise, be gifted with the rich peculiar faculties for his noble designation?

Why shall we doubt that that suitableness of means which in the lower creation awakes our homage and wonder, should be abandoned in the great scale of society, and that nations should be suffered to drop into their places upon the earth like seeds borne upon the vagrant wind? Montesquieu, with the short-sightedness of French philosophy, attributed all national character to climate. Others, not less shortsighted, have attributed it to government. But the Turk, under the sky of Greece, is still the barbarian of the Imaus; the Greek under the government of the Sultan, is still the man whose ancestors were the living flame that kindled the mind of half the world. But for Greece, that mind might have flowed away like the vapor from the mineral, noxious or wasted, till it was turned into light. Every view that history or reason can give us of the purposes, the spirit, and the capabilities of Greece and her people, impresses the conclusion that she was made the original and selected place for the nurture of the highest rank of ability, and that it is no vanity to predict superb intellectual advantages from the renovation.

To be concluded in our next.