Page:Travels & discoveries in the Levant (1865) Vol. 1.djvu/260

210 mountains, thieves and bad characters never find in any Rhodian village that countenance and shelter which is accorded to them in many of the islands.

Their small transactions among themselves are settled with little or no litigation, and with less of those complex intrigues arising from the constant interference of the rich and powerful with the course of justice, which are the bane of society in the Levant. If there is no wealth, there is, on the other hand, no pauperism. After riding all through the length and breadth of the island, I cannot call to mind that I was ever solicited to give alms, except by lepers.

Of course, wherever there are peasant proprietors, land has a constant tendency to accumulate in fewer hands, as want induces the peasant to mortgage his patrimony; and in Rhodes, as elsewhere in the Levant, small capitalists are not wanting, who, from purely philanthropical motives, as one of them gravely assured me the other day, lend money at high rates of interest.

But the wants of the Rhodian peasant are very limited on the one hand, and on the other, his power of parting with real property is very restricted, in consequence of its strict entail here, and elsewhere in the Archipelago, in the female line.$94$

The priests in the Rhodian villages are generally mere clowns, tilling their land like the rest, and knowing just enough Greek to read the services of their church. They have, however, considerable influence, not as spiritual advisers and searchers of