The truth is that outside Serajevo and a few of the larger towns where there are Consuls or resident ‘Europeans,’ neither the honour, property, nor the lives of Christians are safe. Gross outrages against the person—murder itself—can be committed in the rural districts with impunity. The authorities are blind; and it is quite a common thing for the gendarmes to let the perpetrator of the grossest outrage, if a Mussulman, escape before their eyes. There is a proverb among the Bosnian Serbs, ‘No justice for the Christian.’ Miss Irby, who has made many enquiries on these subjects, estimates that in the Medjliss, the only court where Christian evidence is even legally admitted, ‘the evidence of twenty Christians would be outweighed by two Mussulmans.’[244] But why, it may be asked, do not the Christians appeal to the Consuls for protection? In the first place, in a mountainous country like Bosnia, with little means of communication, to do so would in most cases be a physical impossibility. In the second place, as Count Bothmar assured us, if such complaint is made to a Consul, so surely is the complaining rayah more cruelly oppressed than before; henceforth he is a marked man, nor is consular authority so omnipresent as to save him and his family from ruin. ‘God alone knows,’ he exclaimed, ‘what the rayahs suffer in the country districts!’ Remembering the revolting scenes, of which I had been a witness, at the Christian gathering near Comušina, I could believe this. But the most galling oppression, and the main cause of the present revolt, is to be found in the system and manner of taxation. The centralised government set up in Bosnia since 1851 is so much machinery for wringing the uttermost farthing out of the unhappy Bosniac rayah. The desperate efforts of Turkish financiers on the eve of national bankruptcy have at last made the burden of taxation more than even the long-suffering Bosniac can bear. It was the last straw.