CONTENTS.
| Tricoupi and Alison on the Greek Revolution, | [119] |
| Student Life in Scotland, | [135] |
| The Insurrection in Spain, | [151] |
| The Ethnology of Europe, | [165] |
| The Gangetic Provinces of British India, | [183] |
| The Secret of Stoke Manor: a Family History.—Part III., | [206] |
| Conservative Reascendancy Considered, | [230] |
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No. CCCCLXVI. AUGUST, 1854. Vol. LXXVI.
TRICOUPI AND ALISON ON THE GREEK REVOLUTION.[[1]][[2]]
We certainly owe an apology to our Greek ambassador. The nine hundred and ninety-ninth edition of a declamatory old play of Euripides, cut and slashed into the most newfangled propriety by some J. A. Hartung, or other critical German, with a tomahawk, is a phenomenon in the literary world that can excite no attention; but when a regularly built living Greek comes forward in the middle of this nineteenth century, exactly four hundred years after the last Byzantine chronicler had been blown into the air by our brave allies the Turks—and within the precincts of the Red Lion Court, London—ἐν τῇ ἀυλῇ τοῦ ἐρυθροῦ λέοντος—puts forth a regularly built history of the Greek Revolution of 1821, thereby claiming—not without impudence, as some think—a place on our classical shelves alongside of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, and a great way above Diodorus Siculus, and other such retailers of venerable hearsay: this truly is an event in the Greek world that claims notice from the general reviewer even more than from the professed classical scholar. At the present moment, particularly, one likes to see what a living Greek, with a pen in his hand, has to say for himself; his language and his power of utterance is an element in the great Turko-Russian question that cannot be lost sight of. Doubly welcome, therefore, is this first instalment of Mr Tricoupi’s long-expected history; and as it happens opportunely that the most interesting portion of Sir A. Alison’s third volume is occupied with the same theme, we eagerly seize the present opportunity at once to acquit ourselves of an old debt to our Hellenic ambassador, and to thank Sir A. Alison for the spirited, graphic, and thoroughly sympathetic style in which he has presented to the general English reader the history of a bright period of Greek history, which recent events have somewhat tended to becloud. It is not our intention on the present occasion to attempt a sketch of the strategetical movements of the Greek war, 1821–6. A criticism of these will be more opportune when Mr Tricoupi shall have finished his great work.[[3]] We shall rather confine ourselves to bringing out a few salient points of that great movement, which may serve, by way of contrast or similitude, to throw light on the very significant struggle in which we are now engaged. A single word, however, in the first place, with regard to the dialect in which Mr Tricoupi’s work is written; as that is a point on which all persons are not well informed, and a point also by no means unimportant in the decision of the question,—What are the hopes, prospects, and capabilities of the living race of Greeks?
Now, with regard to this point, Mr Tricoupi’s book furnishes the most decided and convincing evidence that the language of Aristotle and Plato yet survives in a state of the most perfect purity, the materials of which it is composed being genuine Greek, and the main difference between the style of Tricoupi and that of Xenophon consisting in the loss of a few superfluous verbal flexions, and the adoption of one or two new syntactical forms to compensate for the loss—the merest points of grammar, indeed, which to a schoolmaster great in Attic forms may appear mighty, but to the general scholar, and the practical linguist, are of no moment. A few such words of Turkish extraction, as ζάμιον, a mosque; φιρμάνιον, a firman; βεζιρης, a vizier; γενίτσαρος, a janizary; ραγιάδης, a rajah, so far from being any blot on the purity of Mr Tricoupi’s Greek, do in fact only prove his good sense; for even the ancient Greeks, ultra-national as they were in all their habits, never scrupled to adopt a foreign word—such as γάζα, παράδεισος, ἄγγαρος—when it came in their way, just as we have κοδράντης, κηνσος, σουδάριον, and a few other Latinisms in the New Testament. The fact is, that the modern Greeks are rather to be blamed for the affectation of extreme purity in their style, than for any undue admixture of foreign words, such as we find by scores in every German newspaper. But this is their affair. It is a vice that leans to virtue’s side, and springs manifestly from that strong and obstinate vitality of race which has survived the political revolutions of nearly two thousand years; and a vice, moreover, that may prove of the utmost use to our young scholars, who may have the sense and the enterprise to turn it to practical account. For, as the pure Greek of Mr Tricoupi’s book is no private invention of his own, but the very same dialect which is at present used as an organ of intellectual utterance by a large phalanx of talented professors in the University of Athens, and is in fact the language of polite intercourse over the whole of Greece, it follows that Greek, which is at present almost universally studied as a dead language, and that by a most laborious and tedious process of grammatical indoctrination, may be more readily picked up, like German or French, in the course of the living practice of a few months. It is worthy of serious consideration, indeed, how far the progress of our young men in an available knowledge of the finest language of the world may have been impeded by the perverse methods of teachers who could not speak, and who gave themselves no concern to speak, the language which they were teaching; who invented, also, an arbitrary system of pronouncing the language, which completely separated them from the nation who speak it. But this is a philological matter on which we have no vocation to enter here: we only drop a hint for the wise, who are able to inquire and to conclude for themselves.
We now proceed to business. There are five points connected with the late Greek Revolution which stand out with a prominent interest at the present moment.
First,—The character, conduct, and position of Russia at the outbreak of the Revolution.
Second,—The character and conduct of the Turks and the Turkish government, as displayed by the manner in which the revolt was met.
Third,—The character, conduct, and political significance of the Greek people, as exhibited during the five years’ struggle.
Fourth,—The character, conduct, and position of Russia, as more fully developed at the conclusion of the struggle.
Fifth,—The character, conduct, and political significance of the Greek people, as exhibited since the battle of Navarino and the establishment of the existing Bavarian dynasty.
On all these points we shall offer a few remarks in the order in which they are set down.
First,—As to the conduct of Russia. It is a remarkable fact, and very significant of the nature of Russian influence in Turkey, that the Greek Revolution did not commence where one might have expected it to commence, in Greece proper—i.e., the mountainous strongholds of Acarnania and the Peloponnesus—but in those very Principalities where we are now fighting, and where the Muscovites are always intriguing. How was this? Plainly because all those Greeks who had for years been brewing revolt in their ἑταιριαι, or secret conspiracies, took it for granted that on that nominally Turkish but really Russian ground, Russia would at once come forward and help them to kill—we use the Imperial simile—the sick old Infidel, who had been so long lying with his diseased lumpish body on the back of the Christian population; and accordingly the man whom they set up to raise the flag of Christian insurrection on the banks of the Pruth and the Sereth, was an officer in the Russian service, Alexander Ypsilanti by name; and the first thing he did when he came forward as military head of the revolt in the Principalities, was to put forth a proclamation, in which the Christian tribes of Turkey were told that “a great European power” might be depended on as “patronising the insurrection”—ὁτι μιά μεγάλη δύναμις τοῦς προστατευει. Now, here was a lie to begin with, to which perhaps the old Græcia mendax may seem not inapplicable: but in fact it was a most probable lie; and if lies were at all justifiable, either on principle or policy, at the opening scene of a great war, certainly this was the lie which at that time and place looked most like the truth. But it is a dangerous thing to raise warlike enthusiasm at any time, especially when an emperor is concerned, by sounding statements not founded on truth. Had the Czar been ever so willing to assist the movement of the Wallachian Greeks, and to lead his victorious Cossacks, scarcely returned from fair Paris, to magnificent Stamboul, he could not but feel offended at the unceremonious manner in which his decision had been taken out of his own mouth, and the absolute spontaneity of an imperial ukase been forestalled by a vagabond Greek captain. But the Greeks were, from the beginning, out of their reckoning in supposing that the then Czar would, as a matter of course, patronise their insurrectionary movement against the Turks. Alexander, though not naturally a very bellicose person, had already done as much for the territorial aggrandisement of Russia as would have contented the most warlike of his predecessors. He had rounded off the north-west corner of his vast domain in the most neat and dexterous way by the appropriation of Finland in 1808; and he had profited alike in the upshot by the friendship of Napoleon at Tilsit in 1807, and by his enmity at Moscow in 1812. That he should enter upon a new, and in all probability a severe contest with another enemy, and put himself at the head of a great insurrectionary movement, disturbing all the peaceful relations so recently established, and in such friendly amity with the great conservative powers at Paris and Vienna, was a proceeding not to be looked for from a moderate and a prudent man. This the Greeks might have known, had they not been befooled by patriotic passion. A “holy alliance” no doubt it was which, in 1815, the pious soul of the good Czar had made with his brother kings; but this “holiness” was either a mere fraternisation of sentiment, too vague to be of any practical force, or at best a religious stamp placed upon a document, the contents of which were essentially political, and did not at all warrant the expectation that the most Christian crowned Allies should be called upon to interfere in supporting every revolt which Christian subjects in any land might feel themselves called upon to make against their traditional lords. Then as to politics: Though Alexander was a most kind-hearted, truly popular, and very liberal sovereign, and had made speeches at Paris, Warsaw, and elsewhere, equal to anything ever spouted by the present Majesty of Prussia in his most liberal fits, yet he was very little of a constitutionalist, and not at all a democrat. From Laybach, therefore, where he was when the revolution broke out in March 1821, he gave his decision in the matter of the Greek insurrection in the following very remarkable words:—
“The motives of the Emperor are now known, from the best of all sources, his own words, in confidential conversation with Mons. de Chateaubriand. ‘The time is past,’ said he, ‘when there can be a French, Russian, Prussian, or Austrian policy. One only policy for the safety of all can be admitted in common by all people and all kings. It devolves on me to show myself the first to be convinced of the principles on which the Holy Alliance is founded. An opportunity presented itself on occasion of the insurrection of the Greeks. Nothing certainly could have been more for my interests, those of my people, and the opinion of my country, than a religious war against the Turks; but I discerned in the troubles of the Peloponnesus the revolutionary mark. From that moment I kept aloof from them. Nothing has been spared to turn me aside from the Alliance; but in vain. My self-love has been assailed, my prejudices appealed to; but in vain. What need have I for an extension of my empire? Providence has not put under my orders 800,000 soldiers to satisfy my ambition, but to protect religion, morality, and justice, and to establish the principles of order on which human society reposes.’ In pursuance of these principles, Count Nesselrode declared officially that ‘his Imperial Majesty could not regard the enterprise of Ypsilanti as anything but the effect of the exaltation which characterises the present epoch, as well as of the inexperience and levity of that young man, whose name is ordered to be erased from the Russian service.’ Orders were at the same time sent to the imperial forces on the Pruth and in the Black Sea to observe the strictest neutrality.”
The publication of this resolution on the part of the Imperial government effectually quashed the movement in the Principalities; and poor Ypsilanti, after a few awkward and ill-managed plunges, was obliged to back out of his position, and, leaving “Olympian George,” and other sturdy Greek mountaineers, in the lurch, seek for refuge, and find a prison in Austria. In this whole affair, however, though the Greeks had shown themselves very vain and foolish, no man can deny that the Czar behaved with great moderation—like a gentleman, in fact, and a Christian, as he was—and moreover, we must add, like a wise politician. For we can scarcely agree with some strong indications of feeling, both in Tricoupi and in Sir Archibald Alison,[[4]] that any Christian power would have been justified in supporting a revolt of Christian subjects against their lawful sovereign, being an Infidel, till these Christians had first shown, by their own exertions, that they were worthy of the intervention which afterwards took place in their favour. We see, also, that Lord Aberdeen, in some late remarks in the House of Lords, was quite correct historically when he called attention to the comparative “moderation” of Russian counsels in some of her dealings with Turkey. Russia, in fact, never has displayed any very flagrant rapacity in her dealings with Turkey, for the best of all possible reasons,—because, having as much of the fox as of the bear in her nature, she does not wish to alarm the European powers on a point where she knows they are peculiarly sensitive. Her policy has been to poison the sick old man, not to kill him; and in this very moderation, as all the world now knows, lies the peculiar danger of her encroachments. Like a deep swirling river, she rolls beneath the fat mud-banks of your political STATUS QUO, and you suspect no harm, and can walk on the green bank with delectation; but when the flood comes, there will be a shaking and a precipitation; and then God help the sleepers!
So much for Russia. Our next question relates to the Turks. How did they behave at the outbreak of the insurrection? The answer is given in two words—like butchers, and like blunderers. Like butchers in the first place. Their way of crushing an insurrection was truly a brutal one—πολιτική θηριώδης as Mr Tricoupi says; or shall we not rather say devilish. Certainly Sylla, in his most sanguinary humours, never enacted anything more inhuman and more diabolical than the wholesale massacre of the prosperous Greeks in Scios, April 1822, which, next to certain scenes when the Furies were let loose in France, forms the most bloody page of modern history.[[5]] When a Turk suspects a Greek of treason, he makes short work of it: no forms of law, no investigation, no trial, no proof; but right on with the instinct of a tiger, in the very simple and effective old Oriental style,—“Why should this dead dog curse my lord the king? let me go over, I pray thee, and take off his head.” So an old Jew once said to King David; but Sultan Mahmoud did not require that a word of cursing should have been spoken. Sufficient that the individual marked for butchery stood in a prominent situation, and was of the same brotherhood as those who had spoken or acted treason: if he was not guilty in his own person, he was bound to be cognisant of the guilt of others; and for not revealing this guilt he must die. Such is the simple theory on which proceeded the wholesale murders which took place at Constantinople so soon as word was brought of the insurrectionary movement in the Principalities. As a specimen of these infamous proceedings, we shall select from Mr Tricoupi’s book the account of the death of the Patriarch Gregory, a murder committed with the most flagrant disregard of all the forms of justice (if there be such forms in Turkey), and under circumstances calculated to rouse to the utmost pitch the spirit of the people whom it was intended to crush; a murder, therefore, not merely cruel and barbarous, but stupid and impolitic. The account given by our author of this most characteristic event is somewhat circumstantial, as might be expected from the piety of a true Greek writing on such a subject. We curtail it, however, as little as possible,—especially as the closing scene, in which Russia appears a chief actor, affords a vivid glimpse of the very natural manner in which, unassisted by any evil arts of diplomacy, that power can continually earn for itself golden opinions among the Christian nations of the south.
“On the evening of Easter Saturday, or great Saturday—το μέγα σάββατον, as the Greeks call it—being the 9th of March, there were seen dispersed in the neighbourhood of the Patriarch’s palace, within and without the Fanar, about five thousand armed Janizaries, without any person knowing why. The Janizaries perambulated the streets of the Fanar the whole night, but did no harm to any one. At midnight, as is the use in our Church, the church-crier made proclamation, and the Christian people, though under great apprehensions, immediately obeyed the sacred summons, and assembled without hindrance or disturbance in the church of the Patriarchate. The Patriarch himself officiated as usual, with twelve other priests; and after the service was finished, the people were dismissed, and retired quietly to their own homes. The Patriarch went to his palace, when the first streaks of day were beginning to appear; but scarcely had he entered, when word was brought that Staurakis Aristarches, the great Interpreter, wished to speak with him. The Patriarch proposed to go with him to his private room, but the Interpreter replied that he preferred being taken immediately to the great Hall of the Synod. There he came with one of the Secretaries of State, and forthwith produced a firman, which he declared he had orders to read aloud without a moment’s delay in the presence of the Patriarch, the chief priests, the heads of the Greek people, and the deacons of corporations. These parties were sent for, and the firman instantly read as follows: ‘Forasmuch as the Patriarch Gregory has shown himself unworthy of the patriarchal throne, ungrateful to the Porte, and a deviser of plots,—for these reasons he is deposed from his office.’ The Patriarch, accompanied by his faithful archdeacon, was immediately led off to prison; and as soon as he had left the hall, a second firman was read out in the following terms: ‘Forasmuch as the Sublime Porte does not desire to deprive his faithful subjects of their spiritual superintendence, he hereby commands them to elect a patriarch according to their ancient custom.’ A consultation immediately took place among the clergy; and they agreed that they should call to the patriarchal throne Cyril, who had been formerly patriarch, and was now in Adrianople; but the secretary replied that this could not be allowed, as the proposed patriarch was absent, and under present circumstances the Porte could not allow the throne to be vacant for a single hour; wherefore he commanded them instantly to make election of a new patriarch from the number of the clergy then present. Another consultation immediately took place; and after considerable difficulty the vote fell upon Peisidias Eugenios, who, according to usage, was immediately sent to the Porte, the rest remaining till he should return. After three hours he appeared, environed with a pomp and circumstance more magnificent than usual.
“This ceremony of electing the new pontiff was still going on, when Gregory was led out of prison, where he had been preparing himself by constant prayer for the death which he had too good reason for supposing was prepared for him. After taking him from the prison, they put him into a boat, and disembarked him on the strand of the Fanar. There the venerable old man, looking up steadfastly to heaven,[[6]] made the sign of the cross, and knelt down, and inclined his hoary head to the executioner’s axe; but the headsman ordered him to rise, saying that here was not the place where he was to be executed. They accordingly led him into his own palace, and there the executioner hung him as he was praying on the threshold of the principal entrance at the hour of noon on Easter Sunday—so that at the very moment when the wretched Christians above were singing the hymn of welcome to their new Patriarch, with the accustomed words εις πολλᾶ ἔτη δέσποτα, his predecessor was hung on the ground-floor like a thief and a malefactor; the very holy person who only a few hours before had offered the bloodless sacrifice for the sins of the people, and had blessed his faithful flock, who, with devoutness and contrition of heart, had kissed the hand that had been hallowed by the handling of the holiest elements. The last moments of Gregory were moments of pure faith and resignation, springing from an unspotted conscience, a heart the fountain of good deeds, a calm contempt of this ephemeral life, and a bright expectation of futurity. The writing of condemnation, by virtue of which he died, called, in Turkish, Yiaftás, was fixed upon the dead body, and set forth the causes of his death as follows.”
Here Mr Tricoupi gives the Turkish act of condemnation at full length; but the substance of it is contained in two points: first, “that the Patriarch did not use his spiritual weapons of excommunication, &c., against the revolters; and, second, that he was personally privy to the conspiracy.” To which two charges the historian answers shortly that the first is directly contrary to the fact (for the revolters were excommunicated by the Greek hierarchy in the capital); and with regard to the second, he avers, that though it was quite impossible for the head of the Greek Church to be ignorant of the existence of a conspiracy of which thousands of the most notable Greeks in Europe were members, yet he was never a member of the secret societies, and had, on the contrary, like many other influential persons of his nation, considered the movement premature,[[7]] and warned his countrymen against it as likely to lead to the most pernicious consequences. But it is vain, as we already remarked, to look for reasons that would satisfy any European ideas of justice in proceedings between Turks in authority and rebellious Giaours. The calm and solemn gentleman, enveloped in smoke and coffee fumes, whose bland dignity we so much admired in time of peace, becomes suddenly seized with a preternatural fury when the scent of Greek blood is in the gale. It is a primary law of his religion, inherited from the oldest Oriental theocracies, that no infidel is entitled to live; and if the head seems more serviceable for the nonce than the capitation-tax, which is its substitute, the law of the Prophet is satisfied, and no man has a right to complain. Mr Tricoupi now proceeds with his narrative.
“The execution being over, the great interpreter, the secretary, and their attendants, left the palace of the Patriarch. In the evening of the same day, Beterli Ali Pasha, who had recently been appointed Grand Vizier, went through the Fanar with only one attendant, and, asking for a chair, sat down for five or six minutes on the street opposite the suspended body of the Patriarch, looking at him, and speaking to his attendant. After an hour the Sultan himself passed the same way, and cast his eye on the Patriarch. The body remained suspended three days; but on the fourth the hangman took it down to throw it into the sea, it being contrary to law in Turkey that persons hung or beheaded should receive burial. Then there came to the hangman certain Jews, and having received his permission (some say that they bribed him), bound together the feet of the corpse, and dragged it away to the extreme end of the quay of the Fanar, with mockery and blasphemous words. Then they threw it into the sea, and gave the end of the rope with which they had bound the feet to the hangman, who, having gone before, was waiting them in a little boat. He immediately, seizing the rope and dragging the body after him, came to the middle of the bay,[[8]] and there attached to the body a stone which he had brought with him in order to sink it: but it proved not weighty enough for this purpose; so he left the corpse floating on the water, and, making for the strand, came back with two other stones, which he attached to the body; and then, giving it two or three stabs with his knife, to let out the water, he immediately sunk it. After some days, however, it came to the surface at Galata between two ships lying at the point where a great many boats are always stationed, for passing over to the city. One of these ships was a Slavonian, and the other a Greek, from Cephalonia. The captain of the Slavonian saw the body first, and threw some straw matting over it, with the view of concealing it till the night, when he meant to bury it, like a good Christian. But when the evening came, the Cephalonian captain anticipated him, and perceiving from the unshaven chin that it was the body of a priest, brought into his ship secretly some Christians, who assured him that it was the body of the Patriarch. The pious Cephaliote immediately swathed the body in a winding-sheet, and, transporting it to Odessa, deposited it in the Lazaretto there.[[9]] There the body was examined by the order of the governor, and was recognised by certain signs as that of the Patriarch.
“Information of this being sent to St Petersburg, orders were given to bury the body with all appropriate honours. The sacred Russian synod came to assist in the funeral ceremony; and on the 17th of June there were assembled in the Lazaretto all the local authorities, political and military, the two metropolitan bishops, Cyril of Silistria, and Gregory of Hieropolis; also Demetrius, bishop of Bender and Akerman, all the clergy of the province, a great number of Greek refugees, who had fled from the butchery at Constantinople. Then the church bells were rung, the funeral psalms were sung, a salute of cannons was given, and, with the accompaniment of military music and the prayers of the congregated faithful, the remains of the venerated Patriarch were carried to the metropolitan church of Odessa. Here they remained three days, till the 19th, when the burial-service was again sung, and a funeral oration was pronounced by Constantine Œconomos, preacher to the Œcomenic Patriarchate, who happened to be in Odessa; after which the body was removed with great pomp to the church of the Greeks, and deposited in a new sepulchre within the railing of the holy altar, at the north side of the holy table, as being the body of a martyr. And thus—to use the very words of the semi-official journal of St Petersburg—by the command of the most pious Autocrat of all the Russians, Alexander I., were rendered due honours of faith and love to Gregory, the holy Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church of the Greeks, who suffered a martyr’s death.”
Next to the butchery—which, by the way, the Greeks, as opportunity offered, were not ashamed to retaliate—the most noticeable thing in the Turkish conduct of the war was their extraordinary slowness, fickleness, inefficiency, and bungling of every sort. The insurrection, though attempted in Thessaly and Macedonia, did, in fact, never extend with any permanent force beyond the narrow boundaries of the present kingdom of Greece, with the addition of Crete, and one or two of the Ægean islands, now in the possession of the Turks; but to suppress this petty revolt of an ill-peopled and divided district, occupying a small corner of a vast empire, all the strength of Turkey, both Asiatic and European, proved in vain; for it was not till Ibrahim Pasha, in 1825, was sent by his father, Mehemet Ali, with a large Egyptian armament that the Morea was recovered to the Sultan, and the insurrection virtually quashed. Now, when we consider that the Greeks of the Morea were stamped with the servitude of nearly four hundred years—that they were, in fact, so awed by the hereditary authority of their haughty masters, that in the beginning of the war, as Gordon expressly testifies, three hundred of them could not be made to stand against thirty Turks; that their only effective leaders were a few brigand chiefs from the wild regions of Acarnania, Ætolia, and Epirus; that the land was of such a nature as to be kept in subjection by fortresses, all of which were in the possession of the lords of the soil; that the sea was open to the men of Stamboul as much as to those of Hydra and to Mehemet Ali’s Egyptians, we shall see plainly that nothing but a wonderful combination of slowness, stupidity, and cowardice on the part of the Turks could have allowed the Greek revolt to protract its existence during the space of those first four years, when—not without large aids from English gold—it continued to present a prosperous front to the world. What strikes us most in the account of the war given by Gordon—who will always be a main authority—is the great want of capacity and enterprise in the Turkish commanders both by sea and land—the very same weakness, in fact, which is remarked at the present hour as afflicting the Turkish armies—a want of good officers. There is in Turkey a want of a high-minded, independent, and energetic middle class, without which an army never can be well officered. Only one efficient Turkish captain appeared in the whole course of the Greek war; and he took Missolonghi.
We have been anxious to bring forward this sad account of the conduct of the Turks in the insurrection distinctly, as there is a danger, at the present moment, of the Turkish military virtue being overrated. No man who knew that nation ever doubted that they could defend a fort well in the present war, as they have ever done where they happened to have a good commander, and acted under encouraging circumstances. This is the secret of the recent successful defence of Silistria, for which we feel all respect. With the English and French fleet to guard their flank, and all Europe as spectators of their mettle, with the very existence of their empire perhaps at stake, and with the choice of their own battlefield—that is, the defence of forts—the Turks would have been dull truly, never to be roused, if the old heroism had not flamed out with more than wonted fierceness. But the successful defence of this fort affords no proof that the people who made it possess a spirit and an organisation able to cope in a continued campaign with some Paskiewitch or Diebitch of the next generation. Let us look to the history of the Greek Revolution, and not believe that the Turks are great masters in the art of war till they have successfully conducted a great campaign. Above all things, matters must be so arranged at the next pacification that the preservation of the peace of Europe may not be left to depend on them.
Our third question has reference to the Greeks. Their conduct in the great revolt by which their independence was ultimately achieved, deserves to be noted with the greater care at the present moment, because there are not a few persons in this country who are only too ready, in the unhappy blunder of 1854, to forget the glorious heroism of 1821–26. Sir A. Alison, we are happy to say, with that large spirit of appreciation for which he is remarkable, has shown no tendency to chime in with this vulgar cry. He is not surprised that the brigands of Thessaly and Epirus should not possess all the virtues of Pericles and Aristides; and therefore he is not offended. The Greeks, in fact, in 1821, were the authors of their own liberty, as much as the Turks now are the authors of the retreat of the Russians from Silistria. Most true it is, that without the intervention of the Allied Powers, notwithstanding their utmost efforts, their cause was lost; so also will the defence of Silistria have proved in vain, if England and France, in the proceedings that are yet waited for, show weakness or vacillation. But the Greeks, in 1821, had this decided moral vantage-ground over the Turks of the present day, that the intervention would never have taken place had it not been forced upon the great Powers by the popular sympathy which the heroism of the Greeks had excited. We may say, upon a review of the whole five years’ struggle, that the Greeks displayed on that occasion all the weakness, and indeed all the vices, that belonged to a people just rising from under the weight of centuries of oppression—but virtues also of the highest order, which it is of the very nature of oppression to make a people forget. Oppression, in fact, had never done its perfect work with this noble-spirited people; it had made intriguers of those who remained in the Fanar, and mere money-changers and money-makers of those who peopled the cities; the base stamp of slavery also might be found on the plains: but freedom remained among the mountains; and in Maina and Souli every brigand chief was a hero. In fact, under such a military despotism as that of Turkey, brigandage, which is outlawed by a good government, becomes the very church militant of liberty. Whatsoever virtues, therefore, belong to the indomitable spirit of nationality when forced to create its own law, and redeem itself from destruction by the desperate efforts of individual self-assertion, belonged to the Greek people, and those Albanian tribes who were identified with them in the highest degree. But there was more than that. The Greeks, as the whole spirit and tendency of Corai’s writings show, were intellectually an advancing people. They had scholars, and thinkers, and poets among them, who were fighting not merely for the rude privilege of freedom—which a brute can understand as well as a man—but for the vindication of an intellectual heritage of which they were proud. To these men the possession of the uncorrupted Greek tongue was not a mere pretty plaything, as it may be to many of our academical men; but it was the badge which publicly proclaimed their brotherhood with that great hierarchy of intellect which had conquered ancient Rome, and inspired modern Europe. These men did not fight with the mere impatient spirit of vulgar insurrection: they came, like banished kings, claiming a long-lost throne; and Europe felt that there was a dignity in their work not belonging to every exile. But there was another element of strength in the Greek revolt, without which it never could have succeeded, and an element which, like their zeal for intellectual culture, proved that the modern Greeks are the true sons of Themistocles and Pericles. This element was their use of the sea. The Turks, though they had possessed the finest harbour in the world for four centuries, though they governed a country where arms of the sea serve the same purpose that railroads do elsewhere, had not only made no progress in the nautical art, but had allowed their enterprising slaves to create for themselves a navy by which they were to succeed in driving their masters out of the field. When Ibrahim Pasha, in his march across the Morea in 1825, had arrived at that high ground between Tripolizza and Argos where the island of Hydra becomes visible, pointing with his hand to that little nest of daring adventurers, he exclaimed, “Thou little England, when shall I hold thee!” This little England it was which saved Greece. There is nothing in the records of modern history more interesting than the dashing exploits of the gallant Ipsariote Canaris with his fire-ships in the Greek war; and wherever Miaulis the Hydriote appeared with his squadron, there everything that could be done was done. But great as were the exploits of the islanders, Europe, perhaps, knew more, and was justly more astonished at the gallant conduct of the land army in the two sieges of Missolonghi—a fortress protected only by shallow lagoons and a mud rampart, and utterly unprovided with those long lines of fire-spouting barricades that make Cronstadt and Sevastopol so difficult of approach. Yet Missolonghi was maintained against the whole force of the Turks for two years; and when it did fall, the resolute garrison made no capitulation, but after having exhausted the last scraps of raw hides and sea-weeds which served them for food, cut their way with gallant desperation, men and women together, through the sabred ranks of their enemies. Nor were they without their reward. Let Mr Alison speak:—
“Thus fell Missolonghi; but its heroic resistance had not been made in vain. It laid the foundation of Greek independence; for it preserved that blessing during a period of despondence and doubt, when its very existence had come to be endangered. By drawing the whole forces of the Ottoman empire upon themselves, its heroic garrison allowed the nation to remain undisturbed in other quarters, and prevented the entire reduction of the Morea, which was threatened during the first moments of consternation consequent on Ibrahim’s success. By holding out so long, and with such resolute perseverance, they not only inflicted a loss upon the enemy greater than they themselves experienced, but superior to the whole garrison of the place put together. The Western nations watched the struggle with breathless interest; and when at last it terminated in the daring sally, and the cutting through of the enemy’s lines by a body of intrepid men, fighting for themselves, their wives, and children, the public enthusiasm knew no bounds. It will appear immediately that it was this warm sympathy which mainly contributed to the success of the Philhellenic societies which had sprung up in every country of Europe, and ultimately rendered public opinion so strong as to lead to the treaty of July, the battle of Navarino, and the establishment of Greek independence.”
On the other hand, we must not shut our eyes to the faults of the Greek people—which were, in fact, just the faults of their ancestors made more large and more prominent by the long-continued action of circumstances favourable to their development. Will it be believed?—during the time that this heroic struggle was going on, by a people manifestly unable, even with their strongest combined exertions, to withstand their gigantic adversary—even in the mid-heat and the critical turning-point of this grapple for free existence, the Greek captains were quarrelling among themselves! There were actually at one time, as Gordon assures us, seven civil wars among a people who could only collect hundreds to plant against the thousands of their masters! Such a self-divided people, one might almost say, was unworthy of liberty. Certainly if they could not agree to fight for themselves, it did not seem the business either of France or England to force them to be patriotic. But, after all, what was this but the natural result of the geography of the country, and of the circumstances under which its latent liberty had been maintained? What was it else but the same thing, on a small scale, which the Peloponnesian war exhibited on a large scale? Division is the weak point of Greece, and always was; and as for other vices which stank so strongly in the nostrils of some of our sentimental Philhellenes—cunning, falsehood, selfishness, rapacity, and blushless impudence of all kinds—such rank weeds grow from a neglected moral soil, not only in Greece, but in the streets of London and Edinburgh, and elsewhere; the only difference being that in our case a wicked or neglectful parent brings up corrupt individuals, while in the case of the modern Greeks, a wicked and neglectful government had brought up a corrupt people. There is, no doubt, some truth in the doctrine of races and hereditary propensities; and the Greek may probably be more subtle in speculation, and more cunning in practice, than the other families of the Indo-European stock. Nevertheless, we are inclined to believe that the proverbial falsehood of the Greeks, which is the worst vice now continually thrown in their teeth, is as much the result of circumstances as of blood, and that, under the same influences, any Teutonic race whose honesty is now most loudly bepraised, would exhibit a large development of the same vice. When a people is not allowed to play the lion, it must either learn to play the fox or perish.
We shall now make a few remarks on the fourth point stated—viz., the circumstances attending the conclusion of the war, as illustrative of the policy of Russia. Here a very interesting contrast immediately presents itself. Alexander, as we have seen, occupied with various benevolent projects and perambulations, fearing also not a little everything in the shape of rebellion and revolution, refused to have anything to do with the Greek insurrection. In this he behaved like a man, a gentleman, and a king, but not like a Russian. As a Russian he would have followed the footsteps of Catherine, who twice, in the latter half of the last century, raised a rebellion in the Morea, and assisted Greece not from any classical enthusiasm, we may be sure, (such as helped not a little to fan the Greek fire of ourselves and the Germans), but that she might cripple Turkey by inflicting such a deep wound on her left leg as would render amputation necessary. All this became plain in a few years. Alexander died. In the year 1826 Nicholas succeeded; and matters were at that period, by the fall of Missolonghi, and Ibrahim Pasha’s occupation of the Morea, brought to such a pass that the bloody five years’ struggle, with all its heroism, must have gone for nothing, had not the tide of popular sympathy begun to move so strongly in favour of intervention among the great European nations, that the governments were forced to take the matter up. England, as the most classical, and, may we not say also, the most generous, country in matters of international feeling, was the first to make overtures for a European demonstration in favour of Greek independence; and of the consulted Powers none came forward with greater alacrity than the new Emperor of the North. On the invitation of the Duke of Wellington, Nicholas was invited to send ships into the Mediterranean to co-operate with the fleets of France and England in coercing the Porte. Here was an opportunity thrown in his way, by pure accident, to achieve in a few days results more favourable to the most cherished projects of Russian aggrandisement than might have been brought about by the tortuous diplomacy and bloody encounters of long years; and this not only without exciting suspicion of ambitious views, but amid acclamations, and cheers, and philanthropic hurrahs innumerable. By joining England and France in establishing the independence of Greece, the Czar felt that not only would Turkey be reft of one of her limbs, but a new field would be opened for diplomatic intrigue in regions hitherto preserved, by the blessings of barbarism, from such refinements. A little tinselled court at Athens, with some German princeling on the throne, was no doubt even then seen in near vista, as the best possible theatre for the display of those arts of political falsehood and finesse in which the Russian Nesselrodes and Pozzo di Borgos excel. But more. Might not the Turk, who is by no means a milksop, and who can deal heavy blows, as we have just seen, even from his sick-bed—might not the Turk oppose the armed intervention of the Powers, and might not some untoward collision be the result, and might not the Turkish navy be annihilated; and then—O! then, might not the way to Constantinople be more open, and the Balkan more easily crossed? Such were the cogitations that might naturally begin to move in the brain of a thoroughly Russian energetic and enterprising young Czar, when the proposal was made to coerce the Sultan into the recognition of the total or partial independence of one of his revolted provinces. And the result, as we all know, was exactly such as the most brilliant imagination of a brisk young emperor could have conceived. In the course of a few months the Turkish fleet was destroyed at Navarino; in two years Kustendji and Varna, and the whole sea-road to Stamboul, were in the hands of the Russian fleet; and in three years General Diebitch had made himself immortal by surmounting the unsurmountable Balkan, and was resting with twenty thousand men (supposed, however, to be sixty thousand!) on the banks of the Hebrus at Adrianople. Never was game better played. The Turko-Russian campaign of 1828–9, which we can now study to such advantage, was, we may say, impossible, but for the battle of Navarino, which was only the natural result of the armed intervention of the three Powers in favour of Greece. Add to this the disorganisation of the Turkish army, caused by the massacre of the Janizaries in 1826, and the consequent disaffection among the old Turkish conservatives; and we shall see at once how the campaign of 1828–9 ended so gloriously for Russia, while that of 1854 has proved so shameful. The cause of the difference lies obviously in the command of the Black Sea, which Russia, by the disaster of Navarino, then had, and which, by the Anglo-French alliance, she now has not. This, and this only, has on the present occasion made the gallant defence of a single fortress by the Turks equivalent to the loss of a whole campaign by the Russians.
The last of our five points only remains—How has the establishment of Greek independence, by the treaty of 1827, answered the expectations of its founders?—What is the actual state of Greece, material, moral, and intellectual?—Are the Greeks under German Otho substantially more prosperous than they were under the Turkish Mahmouds? We cannot, of course, hope to answer these questions satisfactorily within the limits at present prescribed to us; but one or two observations we are compelled to make, for the sake of taming down to somewhat of a more sober temper the glowing observations with which Sir Archibald Alison concludes his fourteenth chapter. There is a class of wise men in the world who show their wisdom only in the negative way of seeing difficulties and making objections. Sir Archibald Alison certainly does not belong to this class. Once possessed by a grand idea, he marches on fearlessly to its realisation, and lets difficulties shift for themselves. He gives you a project for a marble palace and a granite bridge; but seems to forget sometimes that there are only bricks to build with. We like this error, which leans to virtue’s side, and has a savour of something positive and productive; nevertheless the truth must be spoken—for in politics the best intentions are often the mother of the greatest blunders. The remarks of Sir Archibald Alison, which we think require a little chastening, are as follows:—
“In truth, so far from the treaty of 6th July 1827 having been an unjustifiable interference with the rights of the Ottoman Government as an independent power, it was just the reverse; and the only thing to be regretted is that the Christian powers did not interfere earlier in the contest, and with far more extensive views for the restoration of the Greek empire. After the massacre of Chios, the Turks had thrown themselves out of the pale of civilisation: they had proved themselves to be pirates, enemies of the human race, and no longer entitled to toleration from the European family. Expulsion from Europe was the natural and legitimate consequence of their flagrant violation of its usages in war. Had this been done in 1822—had the Congress of Verona acceded to the prayers of the Greeks, and restored the Christian empire of the East under the guarantee of the Allied Powers—what an ocean of blood would have been dried up, what boundless misery prevented, what prospects of felicity to the human race opened! A Christian monarchy often millions of souls, with Constantinople for its capital, would, ere this, have added a half to its population, wealth, and all the elements of national strength. The rapid growth, since the Crescent was expelled from their territories, of Servia, Greece, the Isles of the Archipelago, Wallachia, and Moldavia, and of the Christian inhabitants in all parts of the country, proves what might have been expected had all Turkey in Europe been blessed by a similar liberation. The fairest portion of Europe would have been restored to the rule of religion, liberty, and civilisation, and a barrier erected by European freedom against Asiatic despotism in the regions where it was first successfully combated.
“What is the grand difficulty that now surrounds the Eastern question, which has rendered it all but insoluble even to the most far-seeing statesman, and has compelled the Western Powers, for their own sake, to ally themselves with a state which they would all gladly, were it practicable without general danger, see expelled from Europe? Is it not that the Ottoman empire is the only barrier which exists against the encroachments of Russia, and that if it is destroyed the independence of every European state is endangered by the extension of the Muscovite power from the Baltic to the Mediterranean? All see the necessity of this barrier, yet all are sensible of its weakness, and feel that it is one which is daily becoming more feeble, and must in the progress of time be swept away. This difficulty is entirely of our own creation; it might have been obviated, and a firm bulwark erected in the East, against which all the surges of Muscovite ambition would have beat in vain. Had the dictates of humanity, justice, and policy been listened to in 1822, and a Christian monarchy been erected in European Turkey, under the guarantee of Austria, France, and England, the whole difficulties of the Eastern Question would have been obviated, and European independence would have found an additional security in the very quarter where it is now most seriously menaced. Instead of the living being allied to the dead, they would have been linked to the living; and a barrier against Eastern conquest erected on the shores of the Hellespont, not with the worn-out materials of Mahommedan despotism, but with the rising energy of Christian civilisation.
“But modern Turkey, it is said, is divided by race, religion, and situation; three-fourths of it are Christian, one-fourth Mahommedan: there are six millions of Slavonians, four millions of Bulgarians, two millions and a half of Turks, and only one million of Greeks;—how can a united and powerful empire be formed of such materials? Most true; and in what state was Greece anterior to the Persian invasion; Italy before the Punic wars; England during the Heptarchy; Spain in the time of the Moors; France during its civil wars? Has the existence of such apparently fatal elements of division prevented these countries from becoming the most renowned, the most powerful, the most prosperous communities upon earth? In truth, diversity of race, so far from being an element of weakness, is, when duly coerced, the most prolific source of strength; it is to the body politic what the intermixture of soils is to the richness of the earth. It is the meagreness of unmingled race which is the real source of weakness; for it leaves hereditary maladies unchanged, hereditary defects unsupplied. Witness the unchanging ferocity in every age of the Ishmaelite, the irremediable indolence of the Irish, the incurable arrogance of the Turk; while the mingled blood of the Briton, the Roman, the Saxon, the Dane, and the Norman, has produced the race to which is destined the sceptre of half the globe.
“Such was the resurrection of Greece; thus did old Hellas rise from the grave of nations. Scorched by fire, riddled by shot, baptised in blood, she emerged victorious from the contest; she achieved her independence because she proved herself worthy of it; she was trained to manhood in the only school of real improvement, the school of suffering. Twenty-five years have elapsed since her independence was sealed by the battle of Navarino, and already the warmest hopes of her friends have been realised. Her capital, Athens, now contains thirty thousand inhabitants, quadruple what it did when the contest terminated; its commerce has doubled, and all the signs of rapidly advancing prosperity are to be seen on the land. The inhabitants have increased fifty per cent; they are now above seven hundred thousand, but the fatal chasms produced by the war, especially in the male population, are still in a great measure unsupplied, and vast tracts of fertile land, spread with the bones of its defenders, await in every part of the country the robust arm of industry for their cultivation. The Greeks, indeed, have not all the virtues of freemen; perhaps they are never destined to exhibit them. Like the Muscovites, and from the same cause, they are often cunning, fraudulent, deceitful; slaves always are such; and a nation is not crushed by a thousand years of Byzantine despotism, and four hundred of Mahommedan oppression, without having some of the features of the servile character impressed upon it. But they exhibit also the cheering symptoms of social improvement; they have proved they still possess the qualities to which their ancestors’ greatness was owing. They are lively, ardent, and persevering, passionately desirous of knowledge, and indefatigable in the pursuit of it. The whole life which yet animates the Ottoman Empire is owing to their intelligence and activity. The stagnation of despotism is unknown among them; if the union of civilisation is unhappily equally unknown, that is a virtue of the manhood, and not to be looked for in the infancy of nations. The consciousness of deficiencies is the first step to their removal; the pride of barbarism, the self-sufficiency of ignorance, is the real bar to improvement; and a nation which is capable of making the efforts for improvement which the Greeks are doing, if not in possession of political greatness, is on the road to it.”
Now, to the first proposition contained in the above remarks, that the Great Powers were perfectly justified in their intervention to save the Greeks from the lawless ferocity of the Turks, we have no objections to offer. It is a gladdening thing to believe and to see that the strong cry of human sympathy will sometimes be listened to even by politicians, and that heartless diplomacy in the public intercourse between people and people is not all in all. But the summary expulsion of the Turks from European Turkey, even supposing it were not too great a punishment for the offence, would, when achieved, leave the most difficult part of the Greek problem unsolved. Sir Archibald assumes that the discordant and crude elements of which European Turkey, less the Turks, is composed, would, in 1827, have readily coalesced, or is ready now, in 1854, to coalesce, into a great Greek empire, of which Constantinople shall be the capital. That the Greeks themselves should believe this is natural; that Sir Archibald Alison should believe it, carried away by a noble sympathy with a heroic theme, is but the radiation of that fire with which the noblest minds burn most intensely; but we have never conversed with an individual practically conversant with the elements of which Christian Turkey is composed, who looked upon such a consummation, in the present age at least, as possible. A very intelligent and patriotic Greek gentleman once remarked in our hearing, that the Greek kingdom could never prosper in its present tiny dimensions; that the Greek Islands—except Corcyra, which the English must keep as a naval station—with Thessaly, and part of Thrace and Macedonia, must be added to it before it could be free from that spirit of petty intrigue which is the great vice of small governments. This is intelligible; because the population included under such an extended Greek kingdom would, by a great predominance both of numbers and moral forces, be essentially Greek. But when it is proposed seriously to revive a Byzantine empire, Greek merely in name, and comprising such large sections of a non-Hellenic population as Servia, for instance, and Bulgaria, then, we confess, we feel staggered; and all the historic analogies which Sir Archibald Alison so skilfully presses into his service will not give wings to our drooping faith. The best-instructed man with whom we ever conversed on the subject—Dr George Finlay, who has lived among the Greeks all his life—declares that such a combination is impossible: the principle of cohesion is too weak, that of repulsion too strong: the splendid aggregate would fall to pieces in a few years; and out of the confused elements a new compulsory crystallisation take place under the influence—very likely—of Russian polarity. Sir Archibald Alison himself, in one of the phrases which he accidentally drops, seems to admit the truth of this view. “Diversity of race,” he says, “so far from being an element of weakness, is, when duly coerced, the most prolific source of strength.” Very true, when duly coerced; but it is this very principle of coercion that would not exist in the supposed Byzantine empire; and could exist only, according to one of Sir A. Alison’s own analogies, through the violent subjection of all the other races by the one that happened to be strongest; for so it was, as Livy shows in bloody detail, that the different races of Italy were coerced into a grand national unity by the Roman Latins. But even after all that bloody cementing, the aggregate of the Italian States, as no one knows better than Sir Archibald Alison, was kept together by the loosest possible cohesion; as the terrible outburst of the Marsic or Social war testifies, which well-nigh split Italy into two, at a time when Julius Cæsar, its future master, had not yet begun to trim his beard. He certainly, the lion, and his nephew Augustus, the fox after him, did use the bloody cement successfully, and exercised a strong coercion, the effect of which is visible even now among the again-divided possessors of the Italian soil; such a coercion as the present Czar of Russia might perhaps at the present moment be in the fair way of exercising for the sake of the Orthodox Church, had Sir Archibald Alison’s Byzantine empire been patched together with a few purple rags in the year 1828. Or again, to take another of his analogies, has Sir Archibald Alison forgotten what was the state of Greece, not anterior to, but immediately after the Persian invasion?—did it not plunge at once into all the pettiness of provincial rivalry? and was not the great Peloponnesian war a speaking proof, that there were no elements of cohesion even among pure Greeks, and in the best days of Greece, strong enough to keep that unfortunate country from consuming its own vitals in civil war, and becoming, by voluntary self-betrayal, first the scoff of the Persian, and then the prey of the Macedonian?—With these examples before us, we cannot but consider ourselves more near the truth in following the practical statesmen who declared that the new Greek kingdom should be confined within the limits where the insurrection had chiefly raged, and where the battle had been fought. Sober politicians could not but look upon the whole affair as experimental; and whatever arguments may in the course of events be advanced for an expansion of the limits of the existing monarchy, no person practically acquainted with the events of Greek government, or rather misgovernment, since the creation of Otho’s kingdom in 1832, can imagine that the evils under which the country has groaned would have been less, had Thessaly and Macedonia been at that time included within the Hellenic border. We should still have had German bureaucracy, French constitutionalism, Fanariete intrigue, Ætolian brigandage, and modern diplomacy, thrown together to brew a devil’s soup of jobbery, and falsehood, and feebleness, over which the wisest man can only hold up his hands, and with a hopeless wonderment exclaim—
“Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble!”
In conclusion, we need hardly say that we cannot agree with Sir A. Alison when he states, so strongly as he does in the last paragraph, that “already the warmest hopes of the friends of Greece have been realised; and all the signs of advancing prosperity are to be seen in the land.” It is a great mistake to imagine that the country is really in a prosperous state because Athens has trebled its population in thirty years. Athens has a well-furnished and rather a flourishing appearance, for the same reason that Nauplia looks out upon the beautiful Bay of Argos in such a state of woeful dismantlement and dilapidation: the court has left the Argive city, and travelled to the Attic; and all the gilded gingerbread, which you call prosperity, has gone with it. Let no man be hasty to draw sanguine promises of Greek prosperity from anything good or glittering that may delight his eyes in the streets of Athens. That splendid palace of the little German prince, now called King of Greece, with its fine well-watered gardens without, and its fine pictures within, and its large dancing-saloon, the wonder even of London beauties—this palace was a mere toy of the boy’s poetical papa, and has no more to do with the progress of real prosperity in Greece than a wax-doll has to do with life and organisation. Nay, it may be most certainly affirmed, that not a small part of that sudden growth of the capital of Greece is, with reference to the country at large, a positive evil, a brilliant excrescence, which owes its existence altogether to the artificial attraction of the nutritive fluids of the body politic to one prominent point, while the largest and most useful limbs are left without their natural supply. If there are shining white palaces, and green Venetian blinds, in one Greek city, there is desolation and dreariness, stagnation and every sort of barbarism, in the fields. But “commerce flourishes;” it has doubled, says Sir A. Alison, since the battle of Navarino. Be it so. Patras is a goodly city, preferable, in some points, to Athens, we think; but were there not rich merchants at Hydra before the Revolution? and are the Greeks at Patras more prosperous than at Salonica, at Odessa, at Trieste, at Leghorn, at Manchester? There were always clever merchants among the Greeks, just as generally as there are sharp bankers and money-changers among Jews and Armenians. We would by no means despair of Young Greece; there is much to admire in her, especially her schools, university, and the wonderful culture of her deathless language in its most recent shape; and only in a fit of foolish pettishness would any Englishman entertain the thought of blotting her again out of the map of nations, for any of the many sins she has committed, whether by her own fault, or—what we suspect to be the real truth—by the ignorant and officious agency of German bureaucratists, Anglo-French constitutionalists, and Muscovite diplomatists. Nevertheless, in so slippery a science as politics, and with creatures so difficult to manage as human beings, it is always better to avoid the temptation of drawing panoramic pictures in rose colour; and with regard to Greece, a country to which humanity owes so much, our first duty, in the present very critical state of Europe, is to look soberly at a reality full of perilous problems, and to possess our souls in patience.