So much for Russia. Our next question relates to the Turks. How did they behave at the outbreak of the insurrection? The answer is given in two words—like butchers, and like blunderers. Like butchers in the first place. Their way of crushing an insurrection was truly a brutal one—πολιτική θηριώδης as Mr Tricoupi says; or shall we not rather say devilish. Certainly Sylla, in his most sanguinary humours, never enacted anything more inhuman and more diabolical than the wholesale massacre of the prosperous Greeks in Scios, April 1822, which, next to certain scenes when the Furies were let loose in France, forms the most bloody page of modern history.[5] When a Turk suspects a Greek of treason, he makes short work of it: no forms of law, no investigation, no trial, no proof; but right on with the instinct of a tiger, in the very simple and effective old Oriental style,—“_Why should this dead dog curse my lord the king? let me go over, I pray thee, and take off his head._” So an old Jew once said to King David; but Sultan Mahmoud did not require that a word of cursing should have been spoken. Sufficient that the individual marked for butchery stood in a prominent situation, and was of the same brotherhood as those who had spoken or acted treason: if he was not guilty in his own person, he was bound to be cognisant of the guilt of others; and for not revealing this guilt he must die. Such is the simple theory on which proceeded the wholesale murders which took place at Constantinople so soon as word was brought of the insurrectionary movement in the Principalities. As a specimen of these infamous proceedings, we shall select from Mr Tricoupi’s book the account of the death of the Patriarch Gregory, a murder committed with the most flagrant disregard of all the forms of justice (if there be such forms in Turkey), and under circumstances calculated to rouse to the utmost pitch the spirit of the people whom it was intended to crush; a murder, therefore, not merely cruel and barbarous, but stupid and impolitic. The account given by our author of this most characteristic event is somewhat circumstantial, as might be expected from the piety of a true Greek writing on such a subject. We curtail it, however, as little as possible,—especially as the closing scene, in which Russia appears a chief actor, affords a vivid glimpse of the very natural manner in which, unassisted by any evil arts of diplomacy, that power can continually earn for itself golden opinions among the Christian nations of the south.