Page:Christian Greece and Living Greek.djvu/170

 148 CHRISTIAN GREECE AND LIVING GREEK. In the islands it was in vain that inhabitants fled to their mountains when the tax collectors came. The Turks seized the elders and put them to the bastinado until their wives had brought them their trinkets and those of the neighboring women. It was, moreover, very often the case that the Turks, after appropriat- ing the jewelry, threw husband, wife, and child into slavery. Besides, the inhabitants of the isles were subject to a blood tax, conscription of young men for service in the Turkish fleet. Yet the conscription, writes Bikelas, of sea- faring lads was as nothing in comparison with that indescribable blood tax, the conscription of little children, the memory of which haunts every Greek home like the presence of a devil. Every five years came the moment when the Greek nation received a stab into the heart, when a tenth in human flesh was taken, a tenth which deprived the people of the hope based on the blossom of the manly youth, and which desolated the land with most atrocious certainty. Small de- tachments of Turkish soldiers, each detachment commanded by a captain and each armed with a special firman, travelled through the provinces from place to place. When they came the elders of the villages or towns gathered the inhabitants