These grave shortcomings were doubtless due in part to the geographical character of the country, though it was clear, from what had actually been accomplished, that it would have been both possible and profitable to attempt much more, if the nation’s energy could have been secured for the work. But it is hard to tinker at details when you are kept in a perpetual fever by a question of life and death, and the great preliminary questions of national unity and self-government remained still unsettled.
Before these supreme problems all other interests paled, for they were no will-o’-the-wisps of theoretical politics. It needs a long political education to appreciate abstract ideas, and the Greeks were still in their political infancy, but the realization of Greater Greece implied for them the satisfaction of all their concrete needs at once.
So long as the status quo endured, they were isolated from the rest of Europe by an unbroken band of Turkish territory, stretching from the Aegean to the Adriatic Sea. What was the use of overcoming great engineering difficulties to build a line of European gauge from Athens right up to the northern frontier, if Turkey refused to sanction the construction of the tiny section that must pass through her territory between the Greek railhead and the actual terminus of the European system at Salonika? Or if, even supposing she withdrew her veto, she would have it in her power to bring pressure on Greece at any moment by threatening to sever communications along this vital artery? So long as Turkey was there, Greece was practically an island, and her only communication with continental Europe lay through her ports. But what use to improve the ports, when the recovery of Salonika, the fairest object of the national dreams, would ultimately change the country’s economic centre of gravity, and make her maritime as well as her overland commerce flow along quite other channels than the present?
Thus the Greek nation’s present was overshadowed by its future, and its actions paralysed by its hopes. Perhaps a nation with more power of application and less of imagination would have schooled itself to the thought that these sordid, obtrusive details were the key to the splendours of the future, and would have devoted itself to the systematic amelioration of the cramped area which it had already secured for its own. This is what Bulgaria managed to do during her short but wonderful period of internal growth between the Berlin Treaty of 1878 and the declaration of war against Turkey in 1912. But Bulgaria, thanks to her geographical situation, was from the outset freer from the tentacles of the Turkish octopus than Greece had contrived to make herself by her fifty years’ start, while her temperamentally sober ambitions were not inflamed by such past traditions as Greece had inherited, not altogether to her advantage. Be that as it may, Greece, whether by fault or misfortune, had failed during this half-century to apply herself successfully to the cure of her defects and the exploitation of her assets, though she did not lack leaders strong-minded enough to summon her to the dull business of the present. Her history during the succeeding generation was a struggle between the parties of the Present and the Future, and the unceasing discomfiture of the former is typified in the tragedy of Trikoupis, the greatest modern Greek statesman before the advent of Venezelos.
Trikoupis came into power in 1882, just after the acquisition of the rich agricultural province of Thessaly under the Treaty of Berlin had given the kingdom a fresh start. There were no such continuous areas of good arable land within the original frontiers, and such rare patches as there were had been desolated by those eight years of savage warfare[1] which had been the price of liberty. The population had been swept away by wholesale massacres of racial minorities in every district; the dearth of industrious hands had allowed the torrents to play havoc with the cultivation-terraces on the mountain slopes; and the spectre of malaria, always lying in wait for its opportunity, had claimed the waterlogged plains for its own. During the fifty years of stagnation little attempt had been made to cope with the evil, until now it seemed almost past remedy.
[Footnote 1: 1821-28]
If, however, the surface of the land offered little prospect of wealth for the moment, there were considerable treasures to be found beneath it. A metalliferous bolt runs down the whole east coast of the Greek mainland, cropping up again in many of the Aegean islands, and some of the ores, of which there is a great variety, are rare and valuable. The lack of transit facilities is partly remedied by the fact that workable veins often lie near enough to the sea for the produce to be carried straight from mine to ship, by an endless-chain system of overhead trolleys; so that, once capital is secured for installing the plant and opening the mine, profitable operations can be carried on irrespective of the general economic condition of the country. Trikoupis saw how much potential wealth was locked up in these mineral seams. The problem was how to attract the capital necessary to tap it. The nucleus round which have accumulated those immense masses of mobilised capital that are the life-blood of modern European industry and commerce, was originally derived from the surplus profits of agriculture. But a country that finds itself reduced, like Greece in the nineteenth century, to a state of agricultural bankruptcy, has obviously failed to save any surplus in the process, so that it is unable to provide from its own pocket the minimum outlay it so urgently needs in order to open for itself some new activity. If it is to obtain a fresh start on other lines, it must secure the co-operation of the foreign investor, and the capitalist with a ready market for his money will only put it into enterprises where he has some guarantee of its safety. There was little doubt that the minerals of Greece would well repay extraction; the uncertain element was the Greek nation itself. The burning question of national unity might break out at any moment into a blaze of war, and, in the probable case of disaster, involve the whole country and all interests connected with it in economic as well as political ruin. Western Europe would not commit itself to Greek mining enterprise, unless it felt confident that the statesman responsible for the government of Greece would and could restrain his country from its instinctive impulse towards political adventure.
The great merit of Trikoupis was that he managed to inspire this confidence. Greece owes most of the wheelroads, railways, and mines of which she can now boast to the dozen years of his more or less consecutive administration. But the roads are unfinished, the railway-network incomplete, the mines exploited only to a fraction of their capacity, because the forces against Trikoupis were in the end too strong for him. It may be that his eye too rigidly followed the foreign investor’s point of view, and that by adopting a more conciliatory attitude towards the national ideal, he might have strengthened his position at home without impairing his reputation abroad; but his position was really made impossible by a force quite beyond his control, the irresponsible and often intolerable behaviour which Turkey, under whatever régime, has always practised towards foreign powers, and especially towards those Balkan states which have won their freedom in her despite, while perforce abandoning a large proportion of their race to the protracted outrage of Turkish misgovernment.
Several times over the Porte, by wanton insults to Greece, wrecked the efforts of Trikoupis to establish good relations between the two governments, and played the game of the chauvinist party led by Trikoupis’ rival, Deliyannis. Deliyannis’ tenures of office were always brief, but during them he contrived to undo most of the work accomplished by Trikoupis in the previous intervals. A particularly tense ‘incident’ with Turkey put him in power in 1893, with a strong enough backing from the country to warrant a general mobilization. The sole result was the ruin of Greek credit. Trikoupis was hastily recalled to office by the king, but too late. He found himself unable to retrieve the ruin, and retired altogether from politics in 1895, dying abroad next year in voluntary exile and enforced disillusionment.
With the removal of Trikoupis from the helm, Greece ran straight upon the rocks. A disastrous war with Turkey was precipitated in 1897 by events in Krete. It brought the immediate débâcle of the army and the reoccupation of Thessaly for a year by Turkish troops, while its final penalties were the cession of the chief strategical positions along the northern frontier and the imposition of an international commission of control over the Greek finances, in view of the complete national bankruptcy entailed by the war. The fifteen years that followed 1895 were almost the blackest period in modern Greek history; yet the time was not altogether lost, and such events as the draining of the Kopais-basin by a British company, and its conversion from a malarious swamp into a rich agricultural area, marked a perceptible economic advance.