hout an examination; the "overseas subjects" could become doctors
of medicine or of law on the simple production of a certificate from
two doctors or two lawyers of their country, stating that the
candidate was a capable person. Thereupon he was allowed to
practise--in Dalmatia. And Venice herself was disposed to grant
privileges, such as an exemption from all taxes, to those noblemen and
burgesses and highly placed clergy who were well disposed to her. But
as for schools, she could not ignore an anonymous work of the end of
the sixteenth century, which was attributed to Fra Paolo Sarpi, the
learned councillor of the Republic; he warned them in this book that
"if you wish the Dalmatians to remain faithful to you, then keep them
in ignorance," and again: "In proportion as Dalmatia is poor and a
wilderness, so will her neighbours be less anxious to seize her."

With regard to roads--how could Venice be expected to build roads?
They might have been of service to the population of the interior, but
they would have caused a certain number of those people to devote
themselves to trade, and thus would have prevented them from guarding
the land against the Turk, which was the unquestioned duty of a man
who lived in the interior.

When the Venetians retired from Dalmatia in 1797, after holding it for
three to four hundred years, the country as a country was not
flourishing. The total of exports and imports was such as would now
satisfy a single large trader. But, of course, the land possessed
those buildings with the Lion of St. Mark upon them--which were
possibly put up with the idea of enhancing the prestige of the
Republic--and it possessed the loggia.

In 1797 when the Austrians arrived they found in the prisons of Zadar
that, out of two hundred convicts, fifty were beyond human punishment,
and of these one had been dead for five years. The system was that the
Government allotted to the prisoners for their subsistence a sum that
was so inadequate that they were obliged to borrow from the warders;
and when the prisoner had served his sentence and was unable to repay
the warder, this functionary kept him under lock and key. There in the
same dungeon lay the untried and the convicts and the insane, for whom
there was no separate habitation. It was impossible, said those who
set them free, to describe the horrors of filth, the bare ground not
being even covered with straw, the windows being permanently closed
with blocks of w