This rough but not ill-natured despotism lasted for little more than thirty years, and then in 1849, under the influence of the great upheaval of 1848, it was changed into a system of more popular and democratic build. The old Venetians, when for a couple of centuries they were masters in this region, laid it down that the islanders must be kept with their teeth drawn and their claws clipped. Bread and the stick, said Father Paul, that is what they want. This view prevailed at the colonial office, and maxims of Father Paul Sarpi's sort, incongruously combined with a paper constitution, worked as ill as possible. Mr. Gladstone always applied to the new system of 1849 Charles Buller's figure, of first lighting the fire and then stopping up the chimney. The stick may be wholesome, and local self-government may be wholesome, but in combination or rapid alternation they are apt to work nothing but mischief either in Ionian or any other islands. Sir Charles Napier—the Napier of Scinde—who had been Resident in Cephalonia thirty years before, in Byron's closing days, describes the richer classes as lively and agreeable; the women as having both beauty and wit, but of little education; the poor as hardy, industrious, and intelligent—all full of pleasant humour and vivacity, with a striking resemblance, says Napier, to his countrymen, the Irish. The upper class was mainly Italian in origin, and willingly threw all the responsibility for affairs on the British government. The official class, more numerous in proportion to population than in any country in Europe, scrambled for the petty salaries of paltry posts allotted by popular election. Since 1849 they had increased by twenty-five per cent., and were now one in a hundred of the inhabitants. The clergy in a passive way took part with the demagogues. Men of ability and sense were not wanting, but being unorganised, discouraged, and saturated with distrust, they made no effort to stem the jobbery, corruption, waste, going on around them. Roads, piers, aqueducts, and other monuments of the British protectorate reared before 1849, were falling to pieces. Taxes were indifferently collected. Transgressors of local law went unpunished. In ten years the deficit in the revenue had amounted to nearly £100,000, or two-thirds of a year's income. The cultivators of the soil figured in official reports as naturally well affected, and only wishing to grow their currants and their olives in peace and quietness. But they were extremely poor, and they were ignorant and superstitious, and being all these things it was inevitable that they should nurse discontent with their government. Whoever wanted their votes knew that the way to get them was to denounce the Englishman as ἑτερόδοξος καὶ ξένος, heretic, alien, and tyrant. There was a senate of six members, chosen by the high commissioner from the assembly. The forty-two members of the assembly met below galleries that held a thousand persons, and nothing made their seats and salaries so safe as round declamations from the floor to the audience above, on the greatness of the Hellenic race and the need for union with the Greek kingdom. The municipal officer in charge of education used to set as a copy for the children, a prayer that panhellenic concord might drive the Turks out of Greece and the English out of the seven islands.
Cephalonia exceeded the rest of the group both in population and in vehemence of character, while Zante came first of all in the industry and liveliness of its people.[376] These two islands were the main scene and source of difficulty. In Cephalonia nine years before the date with which we are now dealing, an agrarian rising had occurred more like a bad whiteboy outrage than a national rebellion, and it was suppressed with cruel rigour by the high commissioner of the day. Twenty-two people had been hanged, three hundred or more had been flogged, most of them without any species of judicial investigation. The fire-raisings and destruction of houses and vineyards were of a fierce brutality to match. These Ionian atrocities were the proceedings with which Prince Schwarzenberg had taunted Lord Aberdeen by way of rejoinder to Mr. Gladstone's letters on barbarous misgovernment in Naples, and the feelings that they had roused were still smouldering. Half a dozen newspapers existed, all of them vehemently and irreconcilably unionist, though all controlled by members of the legislative assembly who had taken an oath at the beginning of each parliament to respect and maintain the constitutional rights of the protecting sovereign. The liberty of unlicensed printing, however, had been subject to a pretty stringent check. By virtue of what was styled a power of high police, the lord high commissioner was able at his own will and pleasure to tear away from home, occupation, and livelihood anybody that he chose, and the high police found its commonest objects in the editors of newspapers. An obnoxious leading article was not infrequently followed by deportation to some small and barren rock, inhabited by a handful of fishermen. Not Cherubim and Seraphim, said Mr. Gladstone, could work such a system. A British corporal with all the patronage in his hands, said another observer, would get on better than the greatest and wisest statesman since Pericles, if he had not the patronage. It was little wonder that a distracted lord high commissioner, to adopt the similes of the florid secretary of state, should one day send home a picture like Salvator's Massacre of the Innocents, or Michel Angelo's Last Judgment, and the next day recall the swains of Albano at repose in the landscapes of Claude; should one day advise his chiefs to wash their hands of the Ionians, and on the morrow should hint that perhaps the best thing would be by a bold coup d'état to sweep away the constitution.[377]
III
THE STOLEN DESPATCH
Immediately after Mr. Gladstone had started, what the secretary of state described as the most serious misfortune conceivable happened. A despatch was stolen from the pigeon-holes of the colonial office, and a morning paper printed it. It had been written home some eighteen months before by Sir John Young, and in it he advised his government, with the assent of the contracting powers, to hand over either the whole of the seven islands to Greece, or else at least the five southern islands, while transforming Corfu and its little satellite of Paxo into a British colony. It was true that a few days later he had written a private letter, wholly withdrawing this advice and substituting for it the exact opposite, the suppression namely of such freedom as the islanders possessed. This second fact the public did not know, nor would the knowledge of it have made any difference. The published despatch stood on record, and say what they would, the startling impression could not be effaced. Well might Lytton call it an inconceivable misfortune. It made Austria uneasy, it perturbed France, and it irritated Russia, all of them seeing in Mr. Gladstone's mission a first step towards the policy recommended in the despatch. In the breasts of the islanders it kindled intense excitement, and diversified a chronic disorder by a sharp access of fever. It made Young's position desperate, though he was slow to see it, and practically it brought the business of the high commissioner extraordinary to nought before it had even begun.
He learned the disaster, for disaster it was, at Vienna, and appears to have faced it with the same rigorous firmness and self-command that some of us have beheld at untoward moments long after. The ambassador told him that he ought to see the Austrian minister. With Count Buol he had a long interview accordingly, and assured him that his mission had no concern with any question of Ionian annexation whether partial or total. Count Buol on his part disclaimed all aggressive tendencies in respect of Turkey, and stated emphatically that the views and conduct of Austria in her Eastern policy were in the strictest sense conservative.
Embarking at Trieste on the warship Terrible, Nov. 21, and after a delightful voyage down the Adriatic, five days after leaving Vienna (Nov. 24th) Mr. Gladstone found himself at Corfu—the famous island of which he had read such memorable things in Thucydides and Xenophon, the harbour where the Athenians had fitted out the expedition to Syracuse, so disastrous to Greek democracy; where the young Octavian had rallied his fleet before the battle of Actium, so critical for the foundation of the empire of the Cæsars; and whence Don John had sallied forth for the victory of Lepanto, so fatal to the conquering might of the Ottoman Turks. It was from Corfu that the brothers Bandiera had started on their tragic enterprise for the deliverance of Italy fourteen years before. Mr. Gladstone landed under a salute of seventeen guns, and was received with all ceremony and honour by the lord high commissioner and his officers.
ARRIVAL AT CORFU
He was not long in discovering what mischief the stolen despatch had done, and may well have suspected from the first in his inner mind that his efforts to undo it would bear little fruit. The morning after his arrival the ten members for Corfu came to him in a body with a petition to the Queen denouncing the plan of making their island a British colony, and praying for union with Greece. The municipality followed suit in the evening. The whole sequel was in keeping. Mr. Gladstone with Young's approval made a speech to the senate, in which he threw over the despatch, severed his mission wholly from any purpose or object in the way of annexation, and dwelt much upon a circular addressed by the foreign office in London to all its ministers abroad disclaiming any designs of that kind. He held levees, he called upon the archbishop, he received senators and representatives, and everywhere he held the same emphatic language. He soon saw enough to convince him of the harm done to British credit and influence by the severities in Cephalonia; by the small regard and frequent contempt shown by many Englishmen for the religion of the people for whose government they were responsible; by the diatribes in the London press against the Ionians as brigands, pirates, and barbarians; and by the absence in high commissioners and others 'of tact, good sense, and good feeling in the sense in which it is least common in England, the sense namely in which it includes a disposition to enter into and up to a certain point sympathise with, those who differ with us in race, language, and creed.' Perhaps his penetrating eye early discovered to him that forty years of bad rule had so embittered feeling, that even without the stolen despatch, he had little chance.
He made a cruise round the islands. His visit shook him a good deal with respect to two of the points—Corfu and Ithaca—on which it has been customary to dwell as proving Homer's precise local knowledge. The rain poured in torrents for most of the time, but it cleared up for a space to reveal the loveliness of Ithaca. In the island of Ulysses and Penelope he danced at a ball given in his honour. In Cephalonia he was received by a tumultuous mob of a thousand persons, whom neither the drenching rains nor the unexpected manner of his approach across the hills could baffle. They greeted him with incessant cries for union with Greece, thrust disaffected papers into his carriage, and here and there indulged in cries of κάτω ἡ προστασία, down with the protectorate, down with the tyranny of fifty years. This exceptional disrespect he ascribed to what he leniently called the history of Cephalonia, meaning the savage dose of martial law nine years before. He justly took it for a marked symbol of the state of excitement at which under various influences the popular mind had arrived. Age and infirmity prevented the archbishop from coming to offer his respects, so after his levee Mr. Gladstone with his suite repaired to the archbishop. 'We found him,' says Mr. Gordon, 'seated on a sofa dressed in his most gorgeous robes of gold and purple, over which flowed down a long white beard.... Behind him stood a little court of black-robed, black-bearded, black-capped, dark-faced priests. He is eighty-six years old, and his manners and appearance were dignified in the extreme. Speaking slowly and distinctly he began to tell Gladstone that the sole wish of Cephalonia was to be united to Greece, and there was something very exciting and affecting in the tremulous tones of the old man saying over and over again, “questa infelice isola, questa isola infelice,” as the tears streamed down his cheeks and long silvery beard. It was like a scene in a play.'