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 THE GREEKS UNDER TURKISH BONDAGE. I49 with their sons. The Turkish officer had the power to seize one-fifth of all the boys between the age of seven years and puberty and to select those who were especially handsome, strong, and intelligent or otherwise talented. The fathers and mothers knew that the children they lost were lost to them forever, that they would be circum- cised, become Mohammedans, live and die jani- zaries. As for the race, this tribute threatened its very existence, the very hope of its future was turned against it, its persecutors forged from its very blood the instruments of their oppression. No other enslaved nation has ever had to suffer such torture as this. With all these historical facts before us, it would be difficult to understand how writers, as for in- stance W. Alison Phillips in a book recently published and entitled " The War of Greek In- dependence, 1 82 1 to 1833" (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1897), can repeat statements like the following, did not the author give us the ex- planation : " It is a mistake to suppose that it was the intolerable tyranny of the Turk which forced the Greeks into rebellion." "In many parts of the Turkish dominions, the cultivators of the soil enjoyed a prosperity unknown to the peasantry of some nations accounted more civil-