The long peace of the eighteenth century had marked results upon the social life of the Ionians. It had the bad effect, especially at Corfù, of increasing the desire for luxuries, which the natives could ill afford, but which they obtained at the sacrifice of more solid comfort. Anxious to show their European culture, the better classes relinquished the garb of their ancestors, and the women, who now for the first time emerged from the oriental seclusion in which they had been kept for centuries in most of the islands, deprived themselves of necessaries and neglected their houses in order to make a smart appearance on the esplanade—a practice not yet extinct at Corfù. Yet this partial emancipation of the Ionian ladies, due to the European habits introduced by the increasing number of Venetian officers who had married Corfiote wives, was a distinct benefit to society. Gradually ladies went to the theatre; at first they were screened by a _grille_ from the public gaze, then a mask was considered sufficient protection; finally that too was dropped[279]. The population of the islands and their dependencies in 1795 was put down at 152,722. But Corfù was already in the deplorable state of poverty into which it once more relapsed after the withdrawal of the British. In spite of its splendid climate and its fertile soil the fruitful island of the Phaiakians at the end of the Venetian rule could not nourish its much smaller number of inhabitants for more than four or five months in the year. The fault did not lie with the soil; but few of the proprietors had the capital to make improvements, and few of the peasants had the energy or the necessary incentives to labour. The lack of beasts of burden and of carriageable roads was a great drawback. One governor did at last, in 1794, construct five roads from the town into the country, by means of voluntary subscriptions and a tax on every loaded horse entering the streets[280]. But it was not till the British time that either this or the scarcely less evil of want of water was remedied. The successors of the seafaring subjects of Alkinoös had scarcely any mercantile marine, while the Cephalonians, sons of a less beautiful island, voyaged all over the Levant in search of a livelihood. An attempt to naturalise sugar, indigo, and coffee in a hollow of the Black Mountain was a failure[281]. Zante, less luxurious and naturally richer than either of her two other greater sisters, suffered during the Anglo-French war from the absence of English commerce; and repeated earthquakes, the predecessors of that of 1893, caused much damage there[282]. As might have been expected the Venetian system had not improved the character of the islanders, whose faults were admitted by their severest critics to be due to the moral defects of the government. If the Corfiotes of that day seemed to Saint-Sauveur to be ignorant and superstitious, poor and indolent, they were what Venice had made them.