United States or Malawi ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
For he is a shameless deceiver, who from purely personal motives, from the desire of self-aggrandizement and the love of dominion, has stirred up the tribes to revolt, and exposed them to all the horrors of war; who seeks himself to avoid every danger, while he delivers you, deluded ones, to death; who preaches equality of rights and abolition of all hereditary rights of property simply to get possession himself of the inheritances of your khans and beys; who fills your aouls with his murtosigators, who spare neither the lives nor the property of the innocent inhabitants; who lays on your settlements the burdens of his taxes and the hateful yoke of his despotism; who calls himself your protector and defender, while everywhere his presence is marked by death and desolation.
Only our good-hearted Russian host was up to put an extra morsel in our provision-bag, for, as he said, we could get no food until we reached the Kirghiz aouls on the high plateau of the Talki pass, by which we were to cut across over unbeaten paths to the regular so-called imperial highway, running from Suidun.
"But at the same time I inform you that all the aouls and tribes who join the party of Schamyl and oppose themselves to our rightful authority shall be subjected to the most terrible punishments. The same shall be inflicted also on all those who seek to retire into the mountains, and all those who, having fled thither, do not immediately return to their former habitations.
Thereupon, General Grabbe having razed Akhulgo, having laid a contribution in sheep and cattle on some districts, taken hostages from others, and received the bread and salt of submission from all the aouls through which he passed, returned in triumph to Temir-Chan-Schura.
If the land suitable for agricultural purposes be plentiful, each head of a family may be allowed to take possession of as much of it as he requires, as was formerly done in the Cossack stanitsas; if, on the contrary, the area of arable land is small, as is the case in some Bashkir aouls, there will probably be a regular allotment of it among the families.
They had a portion of their land tilled by Russian peasants, and ceded to these a part of the produce in return for the labour expended; in other words, they assumed the position of landed proprietors, and farmed part of their land on the metayage system. The process of transition had reached this point in several aouls which I visited.
No less than sixty populous aouls of the Kabardians were plundered; twenty Cossack stanitzas were destroyed; and ravaging on either side the lands through which he passed, the Imam seriously threatened the strong places of Mosdok, Jekaderinograd, and Stavropol.
"It is true," she says, "we were unable to visit any of the great centres of population, or to travel amongst the independent tribes, but we saw several aouls on the banks of the Kouban, and were entertained in a princely family, and nowhere did we meet with any of those surpassing beauties whom more fortunate travellers have celebrated."
The aouls which refused to join their party were threatened with destruction; and if they persisted in their refusal, their flocks and herds were driven off, their lands and vineyards laid waste, and their habitations razed to the ground. From others whose fidelity was to be suspected, hostages were taken. Schamyl would allow of no neutrality; whoever was not for him was against him.
During "the troublous times," for example, when the national existence was endangered by civil strife and foreign invasion, they overran the country, robbing, pillaging, and burning as they were wont to do in the Tartar aouls.
Word Of The Day