villages; and as every employ has been transient, rapine, spread
from rank to rank, has been greedy and implacable. The revenue officer
has fleeced the merchant, and commerce was annihilated; the aga has
plundered the husbandman, and culture has degenerated. The laborer,
deprived of his stock, has been unable to sow; the tax was augmented,
and he could not pay it; the bastinado has been threatened, and he
has borrowed. Money, from want of security, being locked up from
circulation, interest was therefore enormous, and the usury of the rich
has aggravated the misery of the laborer.

When excessive droughts and accidents of seasons have blasted the
harvest, the government has admitted no delay, no indulgence for the
tax; and distress bearing hard on the village, a part of its inhabitants
have taken refuge in the cities; and their burdens falling on those who
remained, has completed their ruin, and depopulated the country.

If driven to extremity by tyranny and outrage, the villages have
revolted, the pacha rejoices. He wages war on them, assails their homes,
pillages their property, carries off their stock; and when the fields
have become a desert, he exclaims:

"What care I? I leave these fields to-morrow."

The earth wanting laborers, the rain of heaven and overflowing of
torrents have stagnated in marshes; and their putrid exhalations in a
warm climate, have caused epidemics, plagues, and maladies of all sorts,
whence have flowed additional suffering, penury, and ruin.

Oh! who can enumerate all the calamities of tyrannical government?

Sometimes the pachas declare war against each other, and for their
personal quarrels the provinces of the same state are laid waste.
Sometimes, fearing their masters, they attempt independence, and draw
on their subjects the chastisement of their revolt. Sometimes dreading
their subjects, they invite and subsidize strangers, and to insure their
fidelity set no bounds to their depredations. Here they persecute the
rich and despoil them under false pretences; there they suborn false
witnesses, and impose penalties for suppositious offences; everywhere
they excite the hatred of parties, encourage informations to
obtain amercements, extort property, seize persons; and when their
short-sighted avarice has accumulated into one mass all the riches of
a country, the government, by an execrable perfidy, under pretence of
avenging its oppressed people, takes to itself all their spoils, as if