they
had increased by twenty-five per cent., and were now one in a hundred of
the inhabitants. The clergy in a passive way took part with the
demagogues. Men of ability and sense were not wanting, but being
unorganised, discouraged, and saturated with distrust, they made no
effort to stem the jobbery, corruption, waste, going on around them.
Roads, piers, aqueducts, and other monuments of the British protectorate
reared before 1849, were falling to pieces. Taxes were indifferently
collected. Transgressors of local law went unpunished. In ten years the
deficit in the revenue had amounted to nearly L100,000, or two-thirds of
a year's income. The cultivators of the soil figured in official reports
as naturally well affected, and only wishing to grow their currants and
their olives in peace and quietness. But they were extremely poor, and
they were ignorant and superstitious, and being all these things it was
inevitable that they should nurse discontent with their government.
Whoever wanted their votes knew that the way to get them was to denounce
the Englishman as [Greek: heterodoxos kai xenos], heretic, alien, and tyrant.
There was a senate of six members, chosen by the high commissioner from
the assembly. The forty-two members of the assembly met below galleries
that held a thousand persons, and nothing made their seats and salaries
so safe as round declamations from the floor to the audience above, on
the greatness of the Hellenic race and the need for union with the Greek
kingdom. The municipal officer in charge of education used to set as a
copy for the children, a prayer that panhellenic concord might drive the
Turks out of Greece and the English out of the seven islands.

Cephalonia exceeded the rest of the group both in population and in
vehemence of character, while Zante came first of all in the industry
and liveliness of its people.[376] These two islands were the main
scene and source of difficulty. In Cephalonia nine years before the date
with which we are now dealing, an agrarian rising had occurred more like
a bad whiteboy outrage than a national rebellion, and it was suppressed
with cruel rigour by the high commissioner of the day. Twenty-two people
had been hanged, three hundred or more had been flogged, most of them
without any species of judicial investigation. The fire-raisings and
destruction of houses and vineyards were of a fierce brutality to match.
These Ionian atrocities were the proceedings with