There was nothing
to resist such an army. These troops immediately entered the city and
began an indiscriminate massacre. The city was fired; and in four days
the fire and sword of the Turk rendered the beautiful Scio a clotted
mass of blood and ashes. The details are too shocking to be recited.
Forty thousand women and children, unhappily saved from the general
destruction, were afterwards sold in the market of Smyrna, and sent off
into distant and hopeless servitude. Even on the wharves of our own
cities, it has been said, have been sold the utensils of those hearths
which now exist no longer. Of the whole population which I have
mentioned, not above nine hundred persons were left living upon the
island. I will only repeat, Sir, that these tragical scenes were as
fully known at the Congress of Verona, as they are now known to us; and
it is not too much to call on the powers that constituted that congress,
in the name of conscience and in the name of humanity, to tell us if
there be nothing even in these unparalleled excesses of Turkish
barbarity to excite a sentiment of compassion; nothing which they regard
as so objectionable as even the very idea of popular resistance to
power.
The events of the year which has just passed by, as far as they have
become known to us, have been even more favorable to the Greeks than
those of the year preceding. I omit all details, as being as well known
to others as to myself. Suffice it to say, that with no other enemy to
contend with, and no diversion of his force to other objects, the Porte
has not been able to carry the war into the Morea; and that, by the last
accounts, its armies were acting defensively in Thessaly.
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