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THE GREEKS UNDER TURKISH BONDAGE. 1 35 administration, no protection against conflagra- tion, against inundation, there was no provision made for good roads, there existed no precaution against the plague and other epidemics. Foreign relations grew less and less "on account," as is expressed by M. Chaptal, "of the insecurity which reigns inland, where every species of dis- order was rampant." "Our own French mer- chants," says M. Juchereau de Saint-Denis, " were at one with those of Holland and England in complaining, years before our revolution, that trade in the Levant had ceased to offer the same advantages as formerly, and they attrib- uted the miserable prices offered for their own merchandise and the diminution of their profits to the increasing poverty and depopulation of the Turkish Empire." The plain of Elis had become an uncultivated wilderness. "The ex- ecrable government of the Morea," says the English witness Leake, " added to local tyranny, has reduced the Greeks of Gastouni to such dis- tress that all the cultivated land is now in the hands of the Turks, and the Greek population have become cattle feeders or mere laborers for the Turkish possessors of the soil." With the cessation of cultivation and produc- tion ceased also the communication with the rest