140 WRETCHED STATE OF THE COUNTRY. 



and induce them to murder them in order to be- 

 come possessed of their wealth. 



I fear we must ascribe this strange deficiency 

 of population to the badness of its government. 

 Adam Smith tells us, " The bigotry and op- 

 pressiveness of the government, and not the 

 plague, is the cause of the depopulation of the 

 countries subject to the Turks." 



These words are lamentably true, and unfor- 

 tunately too applicable to Albania. I hope it 

 may not attach as a blot on the fair fame of 

 Europe of the nineteenth century, that its civi- 

 lized nations combined together to perpetuate 

 this state of things, and endeavoured, for the 

 furtherance of their own political schemes, to 

 keep so fine a country as Albania a depopulated 

 waste, and a brave, independent, and high-spirited 

 population in a wretched state of barbarism and 

 degradation. Every one who has the faintest 

 spark of common humanity unextinguished in his 

 breast, — every one whom Christianity reminds to 

 do unto others as he would they should do unto 

 him, — every one to whom the amount of human 

 happiness in the world is of the smallest conside- 

 ration, must, if he see this country in its present 



