In passing from the Venetian to the Turkish despotism the Cretans had exchanged bad for worse. The Venetian was oppressive to the last degree in pecuniary extortions, but the Turk brought in slavery of another form--the harem and all its horrors to a captive people, even then celebrated for the beauty of its women. The Turkish rule has never been, and probably never will be, anything but piracy--the rule of the strong hand. The great object of government was to wring from the governed the largest possible amount of plunder; it is so still. No motive of civilized government has ever yet entered into the head of the Ottoman. The development of a country's resources, even to increase its revenues, has never been thought of. A race of nomad conquerors, holding the land as if it waited the trumpet that should expel it, and could only reap where its predecessors had planted, but never from its own sowing, it has extorted, butchered, and enslaved, without leaving behind it more than its bones to fertilize the soil. The noble public works which marked the Venetian _régime_ in Crete were allowed to fall into decay, the walls of the cities show the shot-holes made by the siege-guns, only filled up when it was necessary to keep the wall from falling. Of the early period of Turkish rule in Crete we know little. Pirates keep no record; and the only insurrection of any note we hear of was that of 1770, which seems to have been mainly a Sphakiote affair, and to have resulted, on the whole, favorably for the mountaineers, from their having been allowed to maintain a virtual independence, as up to 1860 no Turkish garrison was ever permitted in Sphakia. The fortress of Samaria has not been, in the records of modern history, penetrated by an enemy in arms.