succeed in their reforms. By
working in opposition to them and exciting their enmity, success is
impossible.

The social system introduced by the victorious Othmans among the
conquered nations was not as oppressive as is generally believed. The
Turks, unlike the Germanic nations, the Huns and Normans, did not take
forcible possession of private property and divide it among their
conquering hordes. From those who acknowledged themselves subject to
their rule, the Turks exacted tribute, but protected their liberties and
political institutions. The conquerors introduced their laws into the
country, but not forcibly. To those who still adhered to the Christian
religion, they extended the rights of self-government, subject, however,
to a military tax. This was very far from degrading the cultivators of
the soil to servitude; this did not deprive them of their possessions,
inherited or purchased. But by a gradual change in the government this
civil equality and liberty in the possession of property was superseded
by an aristocratic and almost absolute despotism. The Ottomans came in
contact with a people ruling under Byzantine law, of which (as of the
feudal system) they had but a confused knowledge. The feudal system
having taken root in Greece, and having been already introduced into
Albania, had necessarily much influence on the contiguous provinces of
Moldavia and Wallachia, Servia and Bulgaria. Here the Greek emperors,
with correct notions of right and wrong, had governed wisely and justly
in a simple administration, which gave place to a complicated system of
laws and refinements, as unintelligible as they were useless and
ineffective. In the double heritage of Greece and Rome, the conquerors
imitated only their faults, moral and intellectual, and thus made more
prominent the fall of the two countries. The Turks were not sufficiently
enlightened to understand the laws and customs of the Greeks and Romans,
and profit thereby; nor could they resist the charm thrown around
aristocracy and venality, but succumbed to their baneful influences. The
degeneracy of the laws caused the misery of the peasantry, and paralyzed
the energies of the empire. The pashas gained almost unlimited power,
founded on the ruins of civil liberty. They did not scruple to persecute
the suffering peasant, even in the sanctuary of his family--held in the
highest veneration by the Turk. The peasants in many instances had no
other alternative than to f