THE WAR OF GREEK INDEPENDENCE 1821 TO 1833 BY W.ALISON PHILLIPS 1897

294 THE WAR OF GREEK INDEPENDENCE
spite, however, of all the pressure he brought to bear,
and of considerable deposits made by those indefatigable
Philhellenes, King Ludwig
of Bavaria and
the banker Eynardt of Geneva, the project languished,
in the absence of either credit or adequate
securities. The old Turkish system of farming the
taxes, so fruitful of misery and corruption,
had not
been abolished; and, as they now fetched an increased
price, a certain sum was made by putting these
up
once more to auction. It
that the taxes,
was decreed, moreover,
which had hitherto been collected in
kind, were in future to be paid in money:
a regulation
which resulted in giving over the peasantry into
the hands of the usurers.
The President addressed
pitiful appeals for advances to the Cabinets of Europe,
but for the present with very moderate success; and
not till after the outbreak of the Kusso-Turkish war
did he receive subsidies on a large enough scale to
relieve his
embarrassments.
In his dislike and distrust of the men with whom
he had to work, Capodistrias
allowed himself to be
misled into what was possibly the most fatal of all his
many blunders.
He thrust his own brothers into offices
of great importance, for which they were wholly
unfit, and surrounded himself more and more with
compatriots
of his own, members of the same semi-