According to our version the whole affair was concocted by about forty agitators, and these not even Herzegovinians for the most part, but Montenegrines and Dalmatians. Certainly, even the Vali allowed, the tax-farming was a grievance—and who more laudably desirous of removing it than he (the Pashà) himself?—but that, so far as the present rising was concerned, it had not even this ground of justification. That the misguided beings who answered to the summons of the professional agitators were what are called Pandours, somewhat corresponding to the Austrian Grenzers, who, in return for frontier defence, are freed from ordinary taxes, and who, so far from being ruined by the tax-farmers, are actually in receipt of a small sum annually from the Government. Well, yes, there certainly have been some complaints of misgovernment, and the Pashà, always desirous that the meanest of his (the Sultan’s) subjects should share in the fullest measure the beneficence of his lieutenant’s rule, had sent two Commissioners, the Mutasarìf of Mostar and a respectable Christian of Serajevo, Constant Effendi, to inquire into the alleged grievances. But what did these Commissioners report? Just complaints they could hear absolutely none. Thread-bare grievances, often as much as ten years old, were raked up for their benefit, and even these were retailed, not by the alleged victims or their families, but by self-constituted grief-mongers! True, it might be objected that if the insurrection was altogether devoid of just cause, how was its spread to be accounted for? but, really, the explanation was very simple. These frontier agitators, not meeting with sympathy from the loyal Christian subjects of the Sultan, supplied its want by intimidation. That in many cases the Turkish authorities had received messages from Christian villages saying ‘We do not wish to join the insurrection, but we fear that we shall be forced to join.’ And forced to join they were. If a village refused to throw in its lot with the rebels, they first burnt one house or one maize-plot, and then another, till the unhappy villagers, forced to choose between ruin and rebellion, consented to join their ranks. As to the way in which the insurgents were conducting the war, it was almost too horrible to be repeated. That they would often shut up whole families of Moslems in their houses, to which they then set fire. That, (to take a single instance,) at Ljubinje they spitted two children and roasted them alive before their parents’ eyes. And while relating these and other atrocities to our Consul, the tender-hearted Pashà burst into tears. The tears were, I believe, exclusively reserved for our representative—a distinguished mark of confidence.

Dervish Pashà has a well-earned reputation for finesse, but this account of the outbreak can hardly claim even the qualified merit of being ben trovato! The authentic history, as elicited by the Consular Commission of the great Powers,[288] shows very few features in common with this official Turkish explanation. To begin with, however credible may seem the statement that the Turkish governors of the Herzegovina are in the habit of paying Christians to defend their frontier, and whatever sums the Pandours may have been in the habit of receiving from a government on the verge of bankruptcy, these considerations are beside the point, for the focus of the whole movement has been the village of Nevešinje, not on the frontier at all, but, on the contrary, in the heart of the country, only a few miles from Mostar itself.

As in Bosnia, the main cause of the insurrection was the oppression of the tithe-farmers. The case of the Herzegovinian rayahs differs, however, in many respects from that of their Bosnian brothers. This is due to the difference in the physical conditions of the two countries. In Bosnia there are many tracts, like the Possávina, of marvellous fertility, where the most extortionate government cannot so entirely consume the fatness of the land as not to leave the rayah considerable gleanings. Far otherwise is the case in the Herzegovina. The greater part of this country may be briefly described as a limestone desert, and it is the terrible poverty of the soil which makes the position of its Christian tiller so unendurable.

Here, too, the chief product of the earth is not maize, but tobacco and grapes, and the peculiar character of these crops enables the government to extort a double impost on each. For the tobacco as it stands on the ground, and for the grapes when carried off as must, the tithe-farmers exacts his eighth in his usual arbitrary fashion.[289] But now follows a supplementary extortion. On what remains to the rayah, after paying these eighths, he has to pay giumruk, or excise. This, like the former tax, is let out to ‘publicans’ as villanous as the other tithe-farmers, whom they rival in their extortions. They swoop down on an unfortunate village with their gang of retainers and Zaptiehs, and live at free quarters on the villagers. Their business is to find out the quantity of tobacco still growing on the stalk, and the remnant of the wine drawn from the must which has escaped the collector of ‘the eighth;’ and their exactions and insolence are among the grievances on which the insurgents in their appeal to the foreign Consuls lay most stress.[290] These men hold an inquisition on every hearth, and the right which they exercise of intruding themselves into the inmost privacy of the rayah gives them inconceivable opportunities for outrage.

Another of the special evils of the Herzegovina is also in a great measure due to the physical aspect of the country. This is eminently a peak-land. The mountains here are higher than in Bosnia, and the strongholds of the old feudal nobility consequently more impregnable. In Bosnia the native Agas and Begs have been to a certain extent brought under the central government. But in the Herzegovina their authority retains much more of its old vitality. Here the wretched rayah has not only to satisfy the Kaïmakàms and Mutasarìfs, who represent the needs of the Osmanlì ruler, but is at the mercy of a haughty aristocratic caste, who eye their Christian serfs with the contempt of a feudal lord for a villain, and the abhorrence of a fanatical Moslem for a Giaour.

Suffering from this double disability, social and religious, the Christian ‘kmet,’ or tiller of the soil, is worse off than many a serf in our darkest ages, and lies as completely at the mercy of the Mahometan owner of the soil as if he were a slave. Legally, indeed, the Aga who owns all the land is bound to enter into a written agreement with his ‘kmet’ as to the dues and labours to be paid him; but as a matter of fact this petty potentate haughtily refuses to enter into any such compact; and since the Turkish government knows well enough that its tenure of the Herzegovina is not worth twenty-four hours’ purchase if it were seriously to act counter to the native Sclavonic Mahometans, the Beg or Aga can break the law with impunity. He is thus allowed to treat his ‘kmet’ as a mere chattel; ‘he uses a stick and strikes the “kmet” without pity, in a manner that no one else would use a beast.’ Any land that the rayah may acquire, any house he may have built, any patch of garden that his industry may have cleared among the rocks, the Aga seizes at his pleasure. The ordinary dues, as paid by the kmet to the landowner, as specified in the appeal of the Herzegovinian rayahs, are heavy enough. He has to pay, according to the custom of the various districts, a third or a fourth part of the produce of the ground, about Mostar and the Plain of Popovo as much as half;[291] to present him with one animal yearly, and a certain quantity of butter and cheese; to carry for him so many loads of wood; and if the Aga is building a house, to carry the materials for it; to work for him gratuitously whenever he pleases, and sometimes the Aga requisitions one of the kmet’s children, who must serve him for nothing; to make a separate plantation of tobacco, cultivate it, and finally warehouse the produce in his master’s store; and to plough and sow so many acres of land, the harvest of which he must also carry to his master’s barn. Finally, to lodge the Aga in his own house when required, and to provide for his horses and dogs.

The insurrection in the Herzegovina has been directed more against the Mahometan landowners and the tax-farmers than against the immediate representatives of the Sultan. It is mainly an agrarian war.

Add to the extortion of the tax-farmers and landlords, the forced labour which the government officials exact as well as the Agas, the impossibility of obtaining justice in the Medjliss, the atrocious conduct of the brigand-police or Zaptiehs, and, of course, the wolfish propensities of the shepherd of the herd—the Fanariote bishop of Mostar—and we have more than enough to account for the outbreak of the insurrection without going in quest of foreign agitators.

This is not to deny that the insurrection was aided and abetted by Sclavonic agitators from beyond the border. The solidarity between the various members of the South-Sclavonic race has, as we heard from the most well-informed sources, reached a pitch which demands an attention that it has not received from the statesmen of this country. It was inevitable that the Sclaves beyond the Turkish border should sympathize with their oppressed brothers in their struggle for liberty, and should aid them with supplies and recruits. Thus there are many representatives of all the South-Sclavonic peoples from Bohemia to Montenegro fighting in the insurgent ranks,[292] and one of their principal leaders, Ljubibratić,[293] comes from Free Serbia. But that the insurrection was brought about by foreign agitators is strongly disproved by the fact that the outbreak took the Serbian Revolutionary Society—the Omladina itself—by surprise.

But, it will be asked, have the Sclavonic committees and societies, partly literary partly political, established for years at different towns along the Dalmatian and Croatian frontiers, effected nothing? It stands to reason that they have played their part in preparing the rayah for the present outbreak. To their influence, no doubt, is due the fact that among the Christians of several parts of the Herzegovina, including the districts where the revolt first broke out, a defence organization had already been set on foot. The rayahs of every village, who in case of extreme oppression were ready to take arms, had divided themselves into groups of twenty or thirty called Čotas, under a leader whose title was Načenik. When, however, we come to enquire what induced the rayahs to put a halter round their necks by listening to the advice of their free brothers beyond the border, and organizing such measures of protection; when we come to enquire what at last induced them to take up arms—then there is only one ever-recurring answer—it was simply and solely the tyranny of the agents of the Turkish government and the Mahometan landlords.