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

80 THE WAR OF GREEK INDEPENDENCE
there was as yet no centralised fiscal system,
this fell
private pleasure
into the hands of the primates and military leaders,
who too often used it to further the ends of their own
or ambition. The result was a complete
anarchy, which nothing but the habits of obedience
of the people to their local authorities, and the
bond of union which they had in their common religious
enthusiasm and hatred of the Turk, could have
prevented from ending in the ruin of the Greek cause.
Every primate, or bishop, or military chief assumed
himself to have succeeded, in his own locality, to the
Sultan's prerogative.
Under them was the whole military,
fiscal, and criminal government of the various districts,
and as yet they owed no allegiance to any higher
authority. Nor had there been the slightest effort to
reform the most crying abuses of the Ottoman system.
Nothing proves more clearly that the revolt of the
peasantry was motived by religion rather than political
grievances than that, after their success, no improvement
was made in the financial arrangements of
the country, or in the method of collecting taxes ;
nothing was done for the security of property,
that
to establish
law-courts, or to arrange for a publication of
accounts. 1
In the local centres, indeed, public opinion
put some check on the worst abuses; but, in the wider
i Finlay,
i. 281.