The country lapsed into utter anarchy. Peloponnesians and Armatoli, Kolokotronists and Kolettists, alternately appointed and deposed subservient national assemblies and governing commissions by naked violence, which culminated in a gratuitous and disastrous attack upon the French troops stationed in Peloponnesos for their common protection. The three powers realized that it was idle to liberate Greece from Ottoman government unless they found her another in its place. They decided on monarchy, and offered the crown, in February 1832, to Prince Otto, a younger son of the King of Bavaria. The negotiations dragged on many months longer than Greece could afford to wait. But in July 1832 the sultan recognized the sovereign independence of the kingdom of Hellas in consideration of a cash indemnity; and in February 1833, just a year after the first overtures had been made, the appointed king arrived at Nauplia with a decorative Bavarian staff and a substantial loan from the allies.
3
The Consolidation of the State
Half the story of Greece is told. We have watched the nation awake and put forth its newly-found strength in a great war of independence, and we have followed the course of the struggle to its result—the foundation of the kingdom of Hellas.
It is impossible to close this chapter of Greek history without a sense of disappointment. The spirit of Greece had travailed, and only a principality was born, which gathered within its frontiers scarcely one-third of the race, and turned for its government to a foreign administration which had no bond of tradition or affinity with the population it was to rule. And yet something had been achieved. An oasis had been wrested from the Turkish wilderness, in which Hellenism could henceforth work out its own salvation untrammelled, and extend its borders little by little, until it brought within them at last the whole of its destined heritage. The fleeting glamour of dawn had passed, but it had brought the steady light of day, in which the work begun could be carried out soberly and indefatigably to its conclusion. The new kingdom, in fact, if it fulfilled its mission, might become the political nucleus and the spiritual ensample of a permanently awakened nation—an ‘education of Hellas’ such as Pericles hoped to see Athens become in the greatest days of Ancient Greece.
When, therefore, we turn to the history of the kingdom, our disappointment is all the more intense, for in the first fifty years of its existence there is little development to record. In 1882 King Otto’s principality presented much the same melancholy spectacle as it did in 1833, when he landed in Nauplia Bay, except that Otto himself had left the scene. His Bavarian staff belonged to that reactionary generation that followed the overthrow of Napoleon in Europe, and attempted, heedless of Kapodistrias’ fiasco, to impose on Greece the bureaucracy of the ancien régime. The Bavarians’ work was entirely destructive. The local liberties which had grown up under the Ottoman dominion and been the very life of the national revival, were effectively repressed. Hydhriot and Spetziot, Suliot and Mainate, forfeited their characteristic individuality, but none of the benefits of orderly and uniform government were realized. The canker of brigandage defied all efforts to root it out, and in spite of the loans with which the royal government was supplied by the protecting powers, the public finance was subject to periodical breakdowns. In 1837 King Otto, now of age, took the government into his own hands, only to have it taken out of them again by a revolution in 1843. Thereafter he reigned as a constitutional monarch, but he never reconciled himself to the position, and in 1862 a second revolution drove him into exile, a scapegoat for the afflictions of his kingdom. Bavarian then gave place to Dane, yet the afflictions continued. In 1882 King George had been nineteen years on the throne[1] without any happier fortune than his predecessor’s. It is true that the frontiers of the kingdom had been somewhat extended. Great Britain had presented the new sovereign with the Ionian Islands as an inaugural gift, and the Berlin Conference had recently added the province of Thessaly. Yet the major part of the Greek race still awaited liberation from the Turkish yoke, and regarded the national kingdom, chronically incapacitated by the twin plagues of brigandage and bankruptcy, with increasing disillusionment. The kingdom of Hellas seemed to have failed in its mission altogether.
[Footnote 1: King George, like King Otto, was only seventeen years old when he received his crown.]
What was the explanation of this failure? It was that the very nature of the mission paralysed the state from taking the steps essential to its accomplishment. The phenomenon has been, unhappily, only too familiar in the Nearer East, and any one who travelled in the Balkans in 1882, or even so recently as 1912, must at once have become aware of it.
Until a nation has completely vindicated its right to exist, it is hard for it to settle down and make its life worth living. We nations of western Europe (before disaster fell upon us) had learnt to take our existence for granted, and ‘Politics’ for us had come to mean an organized effort to improve the internal economy of our community. But a foreigner who picked up a Greek newspaper would have found in it none of the matter with which he was familiar in his own, no discussion of financial policy, economic development, or social reconstruction. The news-columns would have been monopolized by foreign politics, and in the cafes he would have heard the latest oscillation in the international balance of power canvassed with the same intense and minute interest that Englishmen in a railway-carriage would have been devoting to Old Age Pensions, National Health Insurance, or Land Valuation. He would have been amazed by a display of intimate knowledge such as no British quidnunc could have mustered if he had happened to stumble across these intricacies of international competition, and the conversation would always have terminated in the same unanswered but inconscionable challenge to the future: ‘When will the oppressed majority of our race escape the Turkish yoke? If the Ottoman dominion is destroyed, what redistribution of its provinces will follow? Shall we then achieve our national unity, or will our Balkan neighbours encroach upon the inheritance which is justly ours?’
This preoccupation with events beyond the frontiers was not caused by any lack of vital problems within them. The army was the most conspicuous object of public activity, but it was not an aggressive speculation, or an investment of national profits deliberately calculated to bring in one day a larger return. It was a necessity of life, and its efficiency was barely maintained out of the national poverty. In fact, it was almost the only public utility with which the nation could afford to provide itself, and the traveller from Great Britain would have been amazed again at the miserable state of all reproductive public works. The railways were few and far between, their routes roundabout, and their rolling-stock scanty, so that trains were both rare and slow. Wheel-roads were no commoner a feature in Greece than railways are here, and such stretches as had been constructed had often never come into use, because they had just failed to reach their goal or were still waiting for their bridges, so that they were simply falling into decay and converting the outlay of capital upon them into a dead loss. The Peiraeus was the only port in the country where steamers could come alongside a quay, and discharge their cargoes directly on shore. Elsewhere, the vessel must anchor many cables’ lengths out, and depend on the slow and expensive services of lighters, for lack of pier construction and dredging operations. For example, Kalamata, the economic outlet for the richest part of Peloponnesos, and the fifth largest port in the kingdom,[1] was and still remains a mere open roadstead, where all ships that call are kept at a distance by the silt from a mountain torrent, and so placed in imminent danger of being driven, by the first storm, upon the rocks of a neighbouring peninsula.
[Footnote 1: The four chief ports being Peiraeus, Patras, Syra, and Volos.]