nto the island. To this day the uniform speech of all Kretans is their
native Greek. And yet the progressive conversion of whole clans and
villages had transferred at least 20 per cent. of the population to the
Moslem ranks before the Ottoman connexion was severed again in 1897.

The survival of the Greek nationality did not depend on any efforts of the
Greeks themselves. They were indeed no longer capable of effort, but lay
passive under the hand of the Turk, like the paralysed quarry of some
beast of prey. Their fate was conditional upon the development of the
Ottoman state, and, as the two centuries drew to a close, that state
entered upon a phase of transformation and of consequent weakness.

The Ottoman organism has always displayed (and never more conspicuously
than at the present moment) a much greater stability and vitality than any
of its oriental predecessors. There was a vein of genius in its creators,
and its youthful expansion permeated it with so much European blood that
it became partly Europeanized in its inner tissues--sufficiently to
partake, at any rate, in that faculty of indefinite organic growth which
has so far revealed itself in European life. This acquired force has
carried it on since the time when the impetus of its original institutions
became spent--a time when purely oriental monarchies fall to pieces, and
when Turkey herself hesitated between reconstruction and dissolution. That
critical period began for her with the latter half of the seventeenth
century, and incidentally opened new opportunities of life to her subject
Greeks.

Substantial relief from their burdens--the primary though negative
condition of national revival--accrued to the Greek peasantry from the
decay of Ottoman militarism in all its branches. The Turkish feudal
aristocracy, which had replaced the landed nobility of the Romaic Empire
in Anatolia and established itself on the choicest lands in conquered
Europe, was beginning to decline in strength. We have seen that it failed
to implant itself in Krete, and its numbers were already stationary
elsewhere. The Greek peasant slowly began to regain ground upon his Moslem
lord, and he profited further by the degeneration of the janissary corps
at the heart of the empire.

The janissaries had started as a militant, almost monastic body, condemned
to celibacy, and recruited exclusively from the Christian
tribute-children. But in 1566 they extorted the privilege of legal
marria