Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 131.djvu/780

774 farmers. When Sultan Abdul Aziz travelled in Europe in state, an extraordinary impost was laid upon all the produce previously named, to bear the cost of his journey. This tax raised the tithe to an eighth part of the produce, and though it was imposed as an extraordinary charge for a temporary purpose, it has never been removed, and is now an ordinary tax. It is an eighth, therefore, and not a tithe, that the rayah pays; and when all the extortions are taken into account it may be put down as a sixth or seventh.

I have mentioned, however, but a fraction of the imposts which crush the spirit and paralyze the energies of these subjects of the Porte. Turkey is a great tobacco-grower, and the so-called tithes of this also are farmed out by government. Before the farmers go their rounds, with a goodly company, to value the tobacco crop, some of their agents are sent to examine the quantity of tobacco still growing on the stalk. These "go in procession from house to house and from plantation to plantation, and prolong the time as they please, in order to feed gratuitously." On the pretext of having possibly put down too little, this inquisitorial visit is repeated generally three times, and, after all, the farmers themselves go their rounds, the poor rayah being obliged to provide for them all, however long they may choose to stay. They act, in fact, as masters on his property. They order what they like, and there is nothing for him but humbly to obey.

The oppression involved in all this may be imagined when it is remembered that everything which the peasant can call his own is subject to taxation. All spirits are taxed; herbs used for dyeing are taxed; there is a land-tax, and a house-tax, and a grass-tax; there is a tax of fifteen to twenty piastres on every head of large cattle, and a tax of two piastres on every head of small cattle. This latter tax affords peculiar opportunities and temptations for extortion. The animals are numbered in the month of March, a short time before the greatest mortality in the flocks takes place; and the peasant has to pay, not on the average number of the animals which remain to him, but on the maximum which are alive at any one time.

From two to four piastres have to be paid annually for every beehive. Then there is the horse-service, by which the rayah is obliged to act as the drudge of the military, and is sometimes taken several days' journey from home; and all this without the slightest remuneration, and without any compensation for the horses, which may perish, as many do, in this service.

Another grinding tax from which the Christian subject of the Porte suffers grievously, is the duty of working on the public roads. No member of the family who can work — and there are sometimes as many as ten in a family who are thus liable — is exempted from this duty. The place where the work has to be done may be miles away from the rayah's home, and it may be at a critical season of the year, when all hands are required at home. That matters not; he must obey the summons, and leave his fields and flocks to take their chance. This happens about a fortnight in each year, and though it costs the peasant not less than one hundred piasters a day, he does not get so much as a morsel of bread in return; he gets kicks and insults instead.

Another monstrous tax is the rad or labor-tax. We have seen how thoroughly the rajah's time is taken up in looking after his flocks and fields, and rendering compulsory service to the government. But the Turk thinks that he has still leisure enough on his hands to earn, by daily labor, from five hundred to one thousand five hundred piastres, and on the presumption of these imaginary earnings every Christian is made to pay the fortieth piastre to the government, that is, twenty-five piastres in the thousand. The Christian's word is not taken for the amount of his earnings, it is fixed for him; and though he may be laid on a bed of sickness, or otherwise disabled, the tax must be paid.

The last tax that I shall mention is the poll-tax. Every male Christian, from birth to death, must pay the poll-tax for exemption from the military conscription. It amounts to thirty piastres a head, and every male Christian is bound to pay it, from the new-born babe to the decrepit beggar. It is supposed to be a fine paid for exemption from military service. But, in the first place, the Christians do not wish to be exempt from military service; on the contrary, they object to any such exemption, and the Hatt-i-Humayoun, of 1856, promised the abolition of the exemption — a promise which, it need not be said, has never been fulfilled. But, in the second place, children, and the old and feeble, are not liable to military service under any government, even that of Turkey. How then can they be liable to the fine which is supposed to free them? But it is absurd to appeal to the elementary 