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Updated: July 29, 2025
In this natural, this reasonable, this powerful, this prolific principle, it is for the satirist to expose the ridiculous, it is for the moralist to censure the vicious, it is for the sympathetic heart to reprobate the hard and cruel, it is for the judge to animadvert on the fraud, the extortion, and the oppression; but it is for the statesman to employ it as he finds it, with all its concomitant excellencies, with all its imperfections on its head.
There is an Arab proverb that "the grass never grows in the footprint of a Turk," and nothing can be more aptly expressive of the character of the nation than this simple adage. Misgovernment, monopoly, extortion, and oppression, are the certain accompaniments of Turkish administration.
"Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications," &c. "These are the things which defile a man." "Wo unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess.
It is related that Licinius Macer, a man himself of great power in the city, and supported also by the assistance of Crassus, was accused before him of extortion, and that, in confidence on his own interest and the diligence of his friends, whilst the judges were debating about the sentence, he went to his house, where hastily trimming his hair and putting on a clean gown, as already acquitted, he was setting off again to go to the Forum; but at his hall door meeting Crassus, who told him that he was condemned by all the votes, he went in again, threw himself upon his bed, and died immediately.
This system was extended to Wallachia and Moldavia, and no other Christian race in the Othoman dominions was exposed to so long a period of unmitigated extortion and cruelty as the Roman population of these principalities.
All the people murmured much that Christ would call him and be so familiar with him as, of his own offer, to come unto his house. For they knew him for the chief of the publicans, who were custom-men or toll-gatherers of the Emperor's duties, all which whole company were among the people sore infamous for ravine, extortion, and bribery.
'So you approve her marrying an old rogue and miser, who had heaped up his hoards by extortion of wretched Indians and Spaniards, the very scum of Mammon, coming to the top like everything detestable? 'I never heard his money was ill-gotten. 'Those who spend don't ask whence gold comes.
His pupil, however, was so much offended at their extortion, that he absolutely refused to employ them, even when they abated one half in their demand, and swore he would stay on board till the packet should be able to enter the harbour, rather than encourage such imposition.
During the reign of Tiberius, however, the Roman governors were held in check to some extent by strong central control from Rome, and their extortion was comparatively moderate. The worst of them was Pontius Pilate, and the odium theologicum has, perhaps, had its part in blackening his reputation.
He had appointed as procurator, that is, financial commissioner, in "long-haired" Gaul, a native who, having been originally a slave and afterwards set free by Julius Caesar, had taken the Roman name of Licinius. This man gave himself up, during his administration, to a course of the most shameless extortion.
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