In a campaign of seven days, he had destroyed nearly a score of villages, most of them undefended; had utterly destroyed all hope of compromise or conciliation; and, though he had penetrated the strongest outposts of the insurgents, had attained no other result than the temporary possession of the position of Lakus, the village being a mass of ruins, as a base of operations in case of a new attack on Theriso or an expedition against Omalo, amid the western peaks of the White Mountains. He had anticipated great moral effects from his mountain artillery, but the Cretans learned to despise it. With their old-fashioned firearms, they had managed to harass the Turkish troops to such an extent that they looked to the days when they should fight with rifles with enthusiasm and resolution. Then every burned village left an additional number of men who, having lost all their property, had no interest in peace; so that every advantage he had gained had only increased the force opposed to him. I urged this consideration as strongly as possible on the Commissioner in several visits, which was all the better reason in his mind to make him insist on his policy. He had expected that his name would induce immediate submission, or, at least, that in a single battle he would make so decided an impression that the favorable terms he was then prepared to offer would be at once accepted, but, till the military power of the Cretans was completely broken, the Porte was determined to make no concessions of any kind. The insurgents, on the other hand, were already under the influence of Hellenic enthusiasts, and receiving munitions of all kinds by the blockade-runners, and the drift of their counsels was toward war. It was clear now that the Porte had made a most disastrous blunder, in fact an unbroken series of blunders in all its measures. It should not have entertained the project of transference in the beginning; in the second place, having decided on the transfer, it should have carried it out logically, and not by a bastard popular vote enforced by the presence of an Egyptian army; and finally, having decided to send the Commissioner, it should have sent him at once, instead of keeping him and the answer to the petition waiting for three months. Its whole course was irritating and unjust. It had had no excuse for the employment of force, and was warned by the consular corps, without exception, of the previous dishonest, tyrannical, and impolitic conduct of Ismael Pasha. If it had a consistent policy in the whole matter, it could only have been to provoke an insurrection in Crete when all the other provinces were unable to rise, and so disarm by a crushing suppression the enemy most dreaded of all its subject provinces.