The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II

by William James Stillman

This was evidently the feeling of the populace, and public demonstrations took place which menaced revolution, and on one occasion shots were fired, and the demonstrators were dispersed by the cavalry. I asked him on that occasion why the ministry did not let the revolution loose, and drive the King away. "Ah! they think now that we have no stability,—what would they think then? and what could we get better?" I find in a file of my letters of the time one which says: "I am not surprised at Mrs. ——'s opinion of the King,—there are few people of either sex here who are not of the same opinion, and the conviction is getting very general that no progress or reform is to be hoped for until he is expelled the country." Another, a little later, says: "It looks very much as if there were a revolution preparing, and that the King would have to go. He is so detested that I don't think any one wants to save him." To complicate matters, there came some scandals to light concerning the frauds and peculations in the furnishing of supplies for the army, which was being prepared for a campaign in extravagant haste, and rumor involved persons in the closest intimacy with the prime minister. I do not believe that Comoundouros was personally complicated, but I find in one of my letters the following, under date, "Athens, June 10:"—

"Things here are in a horrible state. The latest disclosures of the great defalcations seem to involve so many officials and non-officials, and break out in so many new directions, that one does not know whom to exonerate. The King and most of the ministers—quantities of officials, persons in high social positions and unblemished reputation—seem to have been carried away by the fever; Comoundouros himself is accused of participation; —— and —— are clearly guilty, and I think the ministry must resign. So far we have no accusation against Tricoupi or any of his friends. That is the only comfort we can draw out of the affair. I am holding back from exposing the affair in the 'Times' from the double motive that the scandal will affect all Greece, and because the affair is not yet fully disclosed and we don't know what it may lead to in the way of exposures. The government is doing everything it can to prevent the investigation extending, and this I mean to stop by exposing the whole matter in the 'Times,' but until it succeeds in arresting the disclosures I shall let them go. Comoundouros is buying up all the correspondents he can, and one of his emissaries told me two or three days ago that if I would help him out I could pocket 20,000 francs."

To this offer I replied by a letter to the "Times" attacking the ministry savagely, and when it was printed and reached Athens, and I saw the minister again, he remarked with his imperturbable good-humor, which indeed never failed him, "How you did give it to us to-day!" As I recall the old man, running over the twenty odd years during which I had known him more or less with long interruptions, I retain my impression of his genuine patriotism and personal integrity; but he was surrounded by people who did profit by their relation to him. He was singularly like Depretis in manner and character; and of Depretis it was said that he would not steal himself, but he did not care how much his friends stole; but I think that the Greek was the abler man by much. Comoundouros mitigated the rancors usual in the politics of Greece (as in those of Italy of to-day) by his unvarying good-nature, never permitting his antagonisms to degenerate to animosities. In the years when I first knew him, during the Cretan insurrection of 1866, he was at his best in power and in patriotism; but during the years which followed, full of the base intrigues which had their birth in the influences surrounding the court, he got more or less demoralized, for patriotism and honesty were no passports to power, and he was ambitious before all things. Not to be in office or near coming to office is in Greece to have no political standing whatever, and the King's defection and betrayal of the interests of Greece in 1868 convinced Comoundouros and many others that with the King there was nothing to be done for a purely Hellenic and consistent policy. All my study of Levantine politics since that day convinces me that in sacrificing the interests of Greece to the demands of the Russian ministry in 1868, the King threw away the only opportunity which Greece has ever had of attaining the position her people and her friends believed her destined to,—that of the heir of the Ottoman empire. The case is now hopeless, for the adverse influences have gained the upper hand, and the demoralization of Greece has progressed with the years. The sturdy independence of Comoundouros in 1868 was wasted, and I can imagine that the old man understood that, though the forms of independence and the semblance of progress must be kept up, there was really no hope of a truly Hellenic revival, and with his hopes and his courage he lost all his patriotic ambitions. In this juncture he was satisfied with the husks which the diplomats threw to Greece, and blustered and threatened war to attain a compromise which should keep him in office and in peace with the King, whom he would gladly have rid Greece of if it had been practicable.

In the struggle with diplomacy he so far gained his point that there was an adjustment of the frontiers in accordance with the treaty. The commission for the delimitation, at the head of which was General Hamley, met at Athens with the intention of beginning the trace from the Epirote side, and I had made all my preparations for accompanying it, when there happened one of those curious mischances which are possible only in the East. The summer was hot and dry, and the mayor of Athens, foreseeing a drought, had decided to turn the stream known as the "washerwoman's brook," one of the few perennial sources in the vicinity, into the aqueduct which supplied the city with drinking water. As all the dirty clothes of Athens, comprising those of the military hospital, in which there were grave cases of typhoid, were washed in that stream, the consequences were soon evident in a great outbreak of the malady in the city, the victims being estimated at 10,000 persons; and, two days before that on which the commission was to start on its work, I was taken ill. I sent for a doctor and he declared the illness to be fever, and probably typhoid. I went to bed, and took for three days in succession forty grains of quinine a day, getting up on the fourth, to find the commission gone and myself in no condition to follow it; and so I missed the most interesting journey which had ever offered itself in my journalistic career. My exasperation at the imbecility of the mayor can be easily imagined, and it was vented in a proper castigation in my correspondence. In the burning weeks that followed, the state of Athens reminded one of Boccaccio's description of Florence in the plague. There were not physicians enough in the city to attend the sick, or undertakers to bury the dead. The funeral processions to the great cemetery beyond the Ilissus seemed in constant motion, and the water-sellers drove a brisk trade in the water of a noble spring under Hymettus.

At the next municipal election the mayor was reëlected triumphantly! The ministry was less fortunate, a dissolution resulting in a majority for the opposition, and Tricoupi came into power. As the most competent and eminent of the rulers of Greece in the following years (for Comoundouros died not long after), and cut off prematurely in the midst of his services to the land he always served with an honest, patriotic devotion, he deserves the commemoration which, as his intimate friend for many years, I am better qualified, perhaps, to render him than any other foreigner. Our friendship began in the period when he held the portfolio of Foreign Affairs in 1867-8 and continued till his death. He was educated and, I think, born in London, where his father held for many years the legation of Greece. The elder Tricoupi and his wife were two of the most sympathetic and admirable people of their race I have ever known, and the elder Tricoupi's history of his country in its later fortunes is recognized as the standard, both in its history and in its use of the modern Greek, purely vernacular, which we have. The son, head of the government or leader of the opposition from an age at which in few countries a man can lead in politics, was, rara avis in those lands, an absolutely devoted patriot and honest man; but his country has never been in a state of political education or patriotic devotion such as to enable it to profit by his ability or his honesty. I well remember that during his first premiership I said to him that I hoped he was in for a long term of office, which might establish some solidity in Greek politics, and he replied, "They will support me until I am obliged to tax them, and then they will turn me out." And so it happened.

The general elections, which were stormy, brought Tricoupi into power; but the violence to the freedom of election of which the government was guilty made them very exciting. One of Tricoupi's chief supporters was standing for Cephalonia, I think, and we heard that there were great preparations to defeat him by the common device of overawing his supporters and driving them from the polls, and I decided to go at once to the locality and watch the method of the elections. The presence of the correspondent at the polling booths, all of which I visited in rapid succession through the day, completely deranged all the plans, and only at one place was there an attempt at illegal pressure, on which occasion one man was shot. The chief of police at the place came to me from time to time, saying, "Have you seen anything illegal?" as if he were under orders to convince me that the law had been obeyed. The result was that the Tricoupist candidate was elected, and he admitted to me that his election was due to my presence. He had only had one man shot, the general plan of carrying the elections by violence having been abandoned in deference to public opinion in England, represented by the correspondent of the "Times."

I decided to go to Volo as soon as the annexation was accomplished, and took letters of introduction to several leading citizens, amongst them one from Tricoupi. The Christian portion of the town was, of course, in exultation, but an attempt at inspection of the Turkish quarter had to be abandoned precipitately before a demonstration of the Mussulman juvenility. My visit had to be abbreviated, for the filthy khan which was the only place of entertainment for man and beast swarmed with bugs and mosquitoes; and, though the five letters I had were to the wealthiest persons in Volo, amongst them being the mayor, not one offered me hospitality when I told them the next day that I must return by the steamer that brought me, in default of a decent bed and eatable food; and, though they expressed polite regrets, they saw no alternative, and I took a return passage. Hospitality in continental Greece has no traditions; and even in Athens, except from Greeks who had lived in England, I have never been asked to accept bed or bread, while in Crete and in the Peloponnesus there was always a more or less active competition as to who should give me both. The stranger, who was in the classical days the messenger of the gods and received welcome as such, has degenerated to the position of the modern tramp. The difference is, no doubt, due to the centuries of oppression and isolation in which the fragments of the race have lived, and in which they have suffered the intrusion of unwelcome elements amongst them, always overborne and finding no protector except their own cunning, and no friend save in their own religion.

A thought that comes up very often while one deals with the Greek in Hellenic lands, is the wonder at the tenacity of the religion of the Greek, surviving the hostility not only of the Turk, but of his fellow Christian of the rival creed. No other nation has ever endured the hostile pressure on its religious fidelity which the Greeks have had to submit to since the fall of Constantinople. The Venetians were even more cruel with the Greeks under their rule than the Turks have ever been, and the influence of the Papal See has always been exerted with the most inflexible persistence for the suppression of what in Rome is called the Greek schism, to which it has shown an animosity greater even than that displayed toward the Protestant Church. And yet I have always found the Orthodox Church in all its ramifications the most charitable and liberal of all the forms of Christianity with which I have come in contact. No stranger is turned from the doors of a Greek convent or refused such succor as is in the power of its inmates, be he Protestant, atheist, or even of their bitterest enemies, the Roman Catholics. No questions are ever asked, and it has twice happened to me that I have lodged at a Greek convent during the most rigid fasts of the Church, when the inmates sat down to a dinner of herbs and dry bread, while to me was given the best their resources could compass—a roast lamb or kid, generally. The kalogeros in attendance, when I was dining on one occasion with the prior of a convent on Good Friday, and ate flesh when the prior himself had nothing but herbs and bread, turned to his superior with a perplexed smile, saying, "Why! he is not even a Christian!" but was none the less cordial afterward—he evidently had no other feeling than that of pity that a man who had been their protector (it was in Crete during the insurrection) should not enjoy the privileges of the Church. This liberal hospitality on the part of the ecclesiastics makes the want of it on the part of the people all the more conspicuous and inexplicable.

In the event Comoundouros found his game of bluff a safe one, for his claims were just, and diplomacy was derelict, or there would have been no utility in the demonstration. But the futility of the Greek threats was most conspicuously shown, for not a battalion got to the frontier in a condition to fight, and two batteries sent off from Athens in great pomp broke down so completely that not a gun was fit to go into action when they reached the frontier. The (for them and for the moment) fortunate issue of the contention by the cession of the territory in dispute seemed to the Greeks in general due to their good military measures, and so confirmed them in the dangerous conviction that the powers were afraid that they might beat the Turks and open the question of Constantinople, etc., which the powers had determined should not be opened. Tricoupi alone of all those who had a policy was of the opinion that the powers should not have interfered, but should have let the Greeks have their way and learn their lesson. It was his opinion that the political education of the Greeks was thwarted by this continual intermeddling of the powers, which made their independence a fiction. Subsequent events showed that he did not nourish that blind confidence in the military capacity of his countrymen which they had, but he said until they were allowed to test their abilities they would never know on what that confidence reposed. The common opinion was that one Greek was worth ten Turks, even in the state of the Greek training. This was not Tricoupi's opinion, which was that it was impossible under the tutelage which the powers exercised for them to know the truth, and he had, from 1867, persistently urged the let-alone policy, which would at least enable them to find their level.

Time has shown that Tricoupi was the only party leader in Greece who saw affairs justly. Had his counsel prevailed, the nation would have found in 1881 what they discovered only in 1897, that they needed training and concentration to hold their own, and that the path of conquest of their ancient estate was set with obstacles which only Spartan discipline and endurance could clear away. As it has happened, the lesson has been learned only after all the competing elements have had theirs and are on the way to the primacy in the Balkans which the Greeks thought the heritage of their race, but of which they can now hold no hope. The protection of the powers has been fatal, for the future of the Levant belongs to the Slav in spite of all the intelligence, activity, and personal morality in which the Greeks excel all their rivals. An English statesman who had to deal with Tricoupi in regard to official matters said to me once that he found him apparently open and business-like, but that when they came to the transaction of matters at issue he proved to be as slippery and dishonest as any of his countrymen. But Tricoupi was a Greek, and evasion, diplomatic duplicity, and the usual devices of the weak brought to terms by the strong, are ingrained with the race. He felt the truth, viz., that all the powers, while professing to protect them, were really oppressing them by their protection, and that the negotiations in which they posed as friends were really hostile measures which he was, in duty to his nation, bound to fight by all the means in his reach; and in this case the means were those of the weak, deprived of liberty of action as much as if they were held down by the troops of the powers.