d them. No practical result was obtained from a letter which the
Serbian Government ordered their representative to read to the Greek
Patriarch, pointing out that only such parishes should be held as
unquestionably Bulgarian which had formerly been subject to the
Patriarchate of Trnovo, even as those of the Pe['c] Patriarchate were
undoubtedly Serbian, while those of Ochrida were disputable, since
that region had belonged in turn to both of them. Small advantage
accrued to the Serbs from their fidelity to the Greek Patriarch: in
Macedonia they came to be regarded by many Slavs as foes to the new
national Church, while the only desire of the Greeks was to use them
for their own purposes. "There are no Serbs in this parish," wrote a
Bishop when the Patriarch commanded him to permit the Serbian priests
now and then to celebrate a Slav service, "there are no Serbs but
merely Greeks" (in which official terminology the Serbs were included)
"and hellenized Vlachs." ... The Serbs about this time were most
unfortunate in warfare. Prince Milan tried to secure, without coming
to blows, from the Sultan what he expected that his victorious armies
would give him, namely, the administration of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
After the failure of the 1874 crops the peasants of Herzegovina and
then of Bosnia were driven to desperation by the demands of the
tax-gatherers. Miss Irby's eloquent description[56] tells us of the
terrible state of these provinces during the years that preceded the
outbreak. Taxes of one-eighth were demanded by the Governor, one-third
or one-half by the Beg, taxes for exemption from military service,
taxes for pigs, cattle and everything "you have or have not." One
informant said, "I have seen men driven into pigsties and shut up
there in cold and hunger till they paid; hung from the rafters with
their heads downwards in the smoke, until they disclosed where their
little stores were hidden. I have known them hung from trees and water
poured down them in the freezing cold; I have known them chained
barefoot and forced to run behind the Beg's carriage...." The
provinces revolted and vengeance was wrecked upon them. More than a
third of the population fled the country. Sir Arthur Evans[57]
describes the refugees as a "squalid, half-naked swarm of women and
children and old men, with faces literally eaten away with hunger and
disease.... After seeing every moral mutilation," he goes on to say,
"that centuries of tyranny could i