The fall of the Albanian rebel, Ali Pasha, in the spring of 1822 made it

possible for Sultan Mahmud, who had hitherto been crippled by the

resistance of Janina, to throw his whole land-force against the Hellenic

revolt; and the Greeks of the mainland, who had as yet had to deal only

with scattered detachments or isolated garrisons, now found themselves

exposed to the attack of two powerful armies. Kurshid, the conqueror of Ali

Pasha, took up his headquarters at Larissa in Thessaly, and from this base

the two invading armies marched southwards on diverging lines. The first,

under Omer Brionis, was ordered to make its way through Southern Epirus to

the western entrance of the Corinthian Gulf, and there to cross into the

Morea; the second, under Dramali, to reduce Central Greece, and enter the

Morea by the isthmus of Corinth; the conquest of Tripolitza and the relief

of the Turkish coast-fortresses which were still uncaptured being the

ultimate end to be accomplished by the two armies in combination with one

another and with the Ottoman fleet. Not less than fifty thousand men were

under the orders of the Turkish commanders, the division of Dramali being

by far the larger of the two. Against this formidable enemy the Greeks

possessed poor means of defence, nor were their prospects improved when

Maurokordatos, the President, determined to take a military command, and to

place himself at the head of the troops in Western Greece. There were

indeed urgent reasons for striking with all possible force in this quarter.

The Suliotes, after seventeen years of exile in Corfu, had returned to

their mountains, and were now making common cause with Greece. They were

both the military outwork of the insurrection, and the political link

between the Hellenes and the Christian communities of Albania, whose action

might become of decisive importance in the struggle against the Turks.

Maurokordatos rightly judged the relief of Suli to be the first and most

pressing duty of the Government. Under a capable leader this effort would

not have been beyond the power of the Greeks; directed by a politician who

knew nothing of military affairs, it was perilous in the highest degree.

Maurokordatos, taking the command out of abler hands, pushed his troops

forward to the neighbourhood of Arta, mismanaged everything, and after

committing a most important post to Botzares, an Albanian chieftain of

doubtful fidelity, left two small regiments exposed to the attack of the

Turks in mass. One of these regiments, called the corps of Philhellenes,

was composed of foreign officers who had volunteered to serve in the Greek

cause as common soldiers. Its discipline was far superior to anything that

existed among the Greeks themselves; and at its head were men who had

fought in Napoleon's campaigns. But this corps, which might have become the

nucleus of a regular army, was sacrificed to the incapacity of the general

and the treachery of his confederate. Betrayed and abandoned by the

Albanian, the Philhellenes met the attack of the Turks gallantly, and

almost all perished. Maurokordatos and the remnant of the Greek troops now

retired to Missolonghi. The Suliotes, left to their own resources, were

once more compelled to quit their mountain home, and to take refuge in

Corfu. Their resistance, however, delayed the Turks for some months, and it

was not until the beginning of November that the army of Omer Brionis,

after conquering the intermediate territory, appeared in front of

Missolonghi. Here the presence of Maurokordatos produced a better effect

than in the field. He declared that he would never leave the town as long

as a man remained to fight the Turks. Defences were erected, and the

besiegers kept at bay for two months. On the 6th of January, 1823, Brionis

ordered an assault. It was beaten back with heavy loss; and the Ottoman

commander, hopeless of maintaining his position throughout the winter,

abandoned his artillery, and retired into the interior of the country.

[369]

[Dramali passes the Isthmus of Corinth, July 1822.]

[His retreat and destruction, Aug., 1822.]

In the meantime Dramali had advanced from Thessaly with twenty-four

thousand infantry and six thousand cavalry, the most formidable armament

that had been seen in Greece since the final struggle between the Turks and

Venetians in 1715. At the terror of his approach all hopes of resistance

vanished. He marched through Boeotia and Attica, devastating the country,

and reached the isthmus of Corinth in July, 1822. The mountain passes were

abandoned by the Greeks; the Government, whose seat was at Argos,

dispersed; and Dramali moved on to Nauplia, where the Turkish garrison was

on the point of surrendering to the Greeks. The entrance to the Morea had

been won; the very shadow of a Greek government had disappeared, and the

definite suppression of the revolt seemed now to be close at hand. But two

fatal errors of the enemy saved the Greek cause. Dramali neglected to

garrison the passes through which he had advanced; and the commander of the

Ottoman fleet, which ought to have met the land-force at Nauplia, disobeyed

his instructions and sailed on to Patras. Two Greeks, at this crisis of

their country's history, proved themselves equal to the call of events.

Demetrius Hypsilanti, now President of the Legislature, refused to fly with

his colleagues, and threw himself, with a few hundred men, into the

Acropolis of Argos. Kolokotrones, hastening to Tripolitza, called out every

man capable of bearing arms, and hurried back to Argos, where the Turks

were still held at bay by the defenders of the citadel. Dramali could no

longer think of marching into the interior of the Morea. The gallantry of

Demetrius had given time for the assemblage of a considerable force, and

the Ottoman general now discovered the ruinous effect of his neglect to

garrison the passes in his rear. These were seized by Kolokotrones. The

summer-drought threatened the Turkish army with famine; the fleet which

would have rendered them independent of land-supplies was a hundred miles

away; and Dramali, who had lately seen all Greece at his feet, now found

himself compelled to force his way back through the enemy to the isthmus of

Corinth. The measures taken by Kolokotrones to intercept his retreat were

skilfully planned, and had they been adequately executed not a man of the

Ottoman army would have escaped. It was only through the disorder and the

cupidity of the Greeks themselves that a portion of Dramali's force

succeeded in cutting its way back to Corinth. Baggage was plundered while

the retreating enemy ought to have been annihilated, and divisions which

ought to have co-operated in the main attack sought trifling successes of

their own. But the losses and the demoralisation of the Turkish army were

as ruinous to it as total destruction. Dramali himself fell ill and died;

and the remnant of his troops which had escaped from the enemy's hands

perished in the neighbourhood of Corinth from sickness and want.

[Greek Civil Wars, 1824.]

The decisive events of 1822 opened the eyes of European Governments to the

real character of the Greek national rising, and to the probability of its

ultimate success. The forces of Turkey were exhausted for the moment, and

during the succeeding year no military operations could be undertaken by

the Sultan on anything like the same scale. It would perhaps have been

better for the Greeks themselves if the struggle had been more continuously

sustained. Nothing but foreign pressure could give unity to the efforts of

a race distracted by so many local rivalries, and so many personal

ambitions and animosities. Scarcely was the extremity of danger passed when

civil war began among the Greeks themselves. Kolokotrones set himself up in

opposition to the Legislature, and seized on some of the strong places in

the Morea. This first outbreak of the so-called military party against the

civil authorities was, however, of no great importance. The Primates of the

Morea took part with the representatives of the islands and of Central

Greece against the disturber of the peace, and an accommodation was soon

arranged. Konduriottes, a rich ship-owner of Hydra, was made President,

with Kolettes, a politician of great influence in Central Greece, as his

Minister. But in place of the earlier antagonism between soldier and

civilian, a new and more dangerous antagonism, that of district against

district, now threatened the existence of Greece. The tendency of the new

government to sacrifice everything to the interest of the islands at once

became evident. Konduriottes was a thoroughly incompetent man, and made

himself ridiculous by appointing his friends, the Hydriote sea-captains, to

the highest military and civil posts. Rebellion again broke out, and

Kolokotrones was joined by his old antagonists, the Primates of the Morea.

A serious struggle ensued, and the government, which was really conducted

by Kolettes, displayed an energy that surprised both its friends and its

foes. The Morea was invaded by a powerful force from Hydra. No mercy was

shown to the districts which supported the rebels. Kolokotrones was

thoroughly defeated, and compelled to give himself up to the Government. He

was carried to Hydra and thrown into prison, where he remained until new

peril again rendered his services indispensable to Greece.

[Mahmud calls for the help of Egypt.]

After the destruction of Dramali's army and the failure of the Ottoman navy

to effect any result whatever, the Sultan appears to have conceived a doubt

whether the subjugation of Greece might not in fact be a task beyond his

own unaided power. Even if the mainland were conquered, it was certain that

the Turkish fleet could never reduce the islands, nor prevent the passage

of supplies and reinforcements from these to the ports of the Morea.

Strenuous as Mahmud had hitherto shown himself in crushing his vassals who,

like Ali Pasha, attempted to establish an authority independent of the

central government, he now found himself compelled to apply to the most

dangerous of them all for assistance. Mehemet Ali, Pasha of Egypt, had

risen to power in the disturbed time that followed the expulsion of

Napoleon's forces from Egypt. His fleet was more powerful than that of

Turkey. He had organised an army composed of Arabs, negroes, and fellahs,

and had introduced into it, by means of French officers, the military

system and discipline of Europe. The same reform had been attempted in

Turkey seventeen years before by Mahmud's predecessor, Selim III., but it

had been successfully resisted by the soldiery of Constantinople, and Selim

had paid for his innovations with his life. Mahmud, silent and tenacious,

had long been planning the destruction of the Janissaries, the mutinous and

degraded representatives of a once irresistible force, who would now

neither fight themselves nor permit their rulers to organise any more

effective body of troops in their stead. It is possible that the Sultan may

have believed that a victory won over the enemies of Islam by the

re-modelled forces of Egypt would facilitate the execution of his own plans

of military reform; it is also possible that he may not have been unwilling

to see his vassal's resources dissipated by a distant and hazardous

enterprise. Not without some profound conviction of the urgency of the

present need, not without some sinister calculation as to the means of

dealing with an eventual rival in the future, was the offer of

aggrandisement--if we may judge from the whole tenor of Sultan Mahmud's

career and policy--made to the Pasha of Egypt by his jealous and far-seeing

master. The Pasha was invited to assume the supreme command of the Ottoman

forces by land and sea, and was promised the island of Crete in return for

his co-operation against the Hellenic revolt. Messages to this effect

reached Alexandria at the beginning of 1824. Mehemet, whose ambition had no

limits, welcomed the proposals of his sovereign with ardour, and, while

declining the command for himself, accepted it on behalf of Ibrahim, his

adopted son.

[Turkish-Egyptian plans.]

[Egyptians conquer Crete, April, 1824.]

[Destruction of Psara, July, 1824.]

The most vigorous preparations for war were now made at Alexandria. The

army was raised to 90,000 men, and new ships were added to the navy from

English dockyards. A scheme was framed for the combined operation of the

Egyptian and the Turkish forces which appeared to render the ultimate

conquest of Greece certain. It was agreed that the island of Crete, which

is not sixty miles distant from the southern extremity of the Morea, should

be occupied by Ibrahim, and employed as his place of arms; that

simultaneous or joint attacks should then be made upon the principal

islands of the Ægæan; and that after the capture of these strongholds and

the destruction of the maritime resources of the Greeks, Ibrahim's troops

should pass over the narrow sea between Crete and the Morea, and complete

their work by the reduction of the mainland, thus left destitute of all

chance of succour from without. Crete, like Sicily, is a natural

stepping-stone between Europe and Africa; and when once the assistance of

Egypt was invoked by the Sultan, it was obvious that Crete became the

position which above all others it was necessary for the Greeks to watch

and to defend. But the wretched Government of Konduriottes was occupied

with its domestic struggles. The appeal of the Cretans for protection

remained unanswered, and in the spring of 1824 a strong Egyptian force

landed on this island, captured its fortresses, and suppressed the

resistance of the inhabitants with the most frightful cruelty. The base of

operations had been won, and the combined attacks of the Egyptian and

Turkish fleets upon the smaller islands followed. Casos, about thirty miles

east of Crete, was surprised by the Egyptians, and its population

exterminated. Psara was selected for the attack of the Turkish fleet. Since

the beginning of the insurrection the Psariotes had been the scourge and

terror of the Ottoman coasts. The services that they had rendered in the

Greek navy had been priceless; and if there was one spot of Greek soil

which ought to have been protected as long as a single boat's crew remained

afloat, it was the little rock of Psara. Yet, in spite of repeated

warnings, the Greek Government allowed the Turkish fleet to pass the

Dardanelles unobserved, and some clumsy feints were enough to blind it to

the real object of an expedition whose aim was known to all Europe. There

were ample means for succouring the islanders, as subsequent events proved;

but when the Turkish admiral, Khosrew, with 10,000 men on board, appeared

before Psara, the Greek fleet was far away. The Psariotes themselves were

over-confident. They trusted to their batteries on land, and believed their

rocks to be impregnable. They were soon undeceived. While a corps of

Albanians scaled the cliffs behind the town, the Turks gained a footing in

front, and overwhelmed their gallant enemy by weight of numbers. No mercy

was asked or given. Eight thousand of the Psarians were slain or carried

away as slaves. Not more than one-third of the population succeeded in

escaping to the neighbouring islands. [370]

[Greek successes off the coast of Asia Minor, September, 1824.]

[Ibrahim reaches Crete. December, 1824.]

The first part of the Turko-Egyptian plan had thus been successfully

accomplished, and if Khosrew had attacked Samos immediately after his first

victory, this island would probably have fallen before help could arrive.

But, like other Turkish commanders, Khosrew loved intervals of repose, and

he now sailed off to Mytilene to celebrate the festival of Bairam. In the

meantime the catastrophe of Psara had aroused the Hydriote Government to a

sense of its danger. A strong fleet was sent across the Ægæan, and adequate

measures were taken to defend Samos both by land and sea. The Turkish fleet

was attacked with some success, and though Ibrahim with the Egyptian

contingent now reached the coast of Asia Minor, the Greeks proved

themselves superior to their adversaries combined. The operations of the

Mussulman commanders led to no result; they were harassed and terrified by

the Greek fireships; and when at length all hope of a joint conquest of

Samos had been abandoned, and Ibrahim set sail for Crete to carry out his

own final enterprise alone, he was met on the high seas by the Greeks, and

driven back to the coast of Asia Minor. During the autumn of 1824 the

disasters of the preceding months were to some extent retrieved, and the

situation of the Egyptian fleet would have become one of some peril if the

Greeks had maintained their guard throughout the winter. But they

underrated the energy of Ibrahim, and surrendered themselves to the belief

that he would not repeat the attempt to reach Crete until the following

spring. Careless, or deluded by false information, they returned to Hydra,

and left the seas unwatched. Ibrahim saw his opportunity, and, setting sail

for Crete at the beginning of December, he reached it without falling in

with the enemy.

[Ibrahim in the Morea, Feb., 1825.]

The snowy heights of Taygetus are visible on a clear winter's day from the

Cretan coast; yet, with their enemy actually in view of them, the Greeks

neglected to guard the passage to the Morea. On the 22nd of February, 1825,

Ibrahim crossed the sea unopposed and landed five thousand men at Modon. He

was even able to return to Crete and bring over a second contingent of

superior strength before any steps were taken to hinder his movements. The

fate of the mainland was now settled. Ibrahim marched from Modon upon

Navarino, defeated the Greek forces on the way, and captured the garrison

placed in the Island of Sphakteria--the scene of the first famous surrender

of the Spartans--before the Greek fleet could arrive to relieve it. The

forts of Navarino then capitulated, and Ibrahim pushed on his victorious

march towards the centre of the Morea. It was in vain that the old chief

Kolokotrones was brought from his prison at Hydra to take supreme command.

The conqueror of Dramali was unable to resist the onslaught of Ibrahim's

regiments, recruited from the fierce races of the Soudan, and fighting

with the same arms and under the same discipline as the best troops in

Europe. Kolokotrones was driven back through Tripolitza, and retired as the

Russians had retired from Moscow, leaving a deserted capital behind him.

Ibrahim gave his troops no rest; he hurried onwards against Nauplia, and on

the 24th of June reached the summit of the mountain-pass that looks down

upon the Argolic Gulf. "Ah, little island," he cried, as he saw the rock of

Hydra stretched below him, "how long wilt thou escape me?" At Nauplia

itself the Egyptian commander rode up to the very gates and scanned the

defences, which he hoped to carry at the first assault. Here, however, a

check awaited him. In the midst of general flight and panic, Demetrius

Hypsilanti was again the undaunted soldier. He threw himself with some few

hundreds of men into the mills of Lerna, and there beat back Ibrahim's

vanguard when it attempted to carry this post by storm. The Egyptian

recognised that with men like these in front of him Nauplia could be

reduced only by a regular siege. He retired for a while upon Tripolitza,

and thence sent out his harrying columns, slaughtering and devastating in

every direction. It seemed to be his design not merely to exhaust the

resources of his enemy but to render the Morea a desert, and to exterminate

its population. In the very birthplace of European civilisation, it was

said, this savage, who had already been nominated Pasha of the Morea,

intended to extinguish the European race and name, and to found for himself

upon the ashes of Greece a new barbaric state composed of African negroes

and fellaheen. That such design had actually been formed was denied by the

Turkish government in answer to official inquiries, and its existence was

not capable of proof. But the brutality of one age is the stupidity of the

next, and Ibrahim's violence recoiled upon himself. Nothing in the whole

struggle between the Sultan and the Greeks gave so irresistible an argument

to the Philhellenes throughout Europe, or so directly overcame the scruples

of Governments in regard to an armed intervention in favour of Greece, as

Ibrahim's alleged policy of extermination and re-settlement. The days were

past when Europe could permit its weakest member to be torn from it and

added to the Mohammedan world.

[Siege of Missolonghi, April, 1825-April, 1826.]

One episode of the deepest tragic interest yet remained in the

Turko-Hellenic conflict before the Powers of Europe stepped in and struck

with weapons stronger than those which had fallen from dying hands. The

town of Missolonghi was now beleaguered by the Turks, who had invaded

Western Greece while Ibrahim was overrunning the Morea. Missolonghi had

already once been besieged without success; and, as in the case of

Saragossa, the first deliverance appears to have inspired the townspeople

with the resolution, maintained even more heroically at Missolonghi than at

the Spanish city, to die rather than capitulate. From the time when

Reschid, the Turkish commander, opened the second attack by land and sea in

the spring of 1825, the garrison and the inhabitants met every movement of

the enemy with the most obstinate resistance. It was in vain that Reschid

broke through the defences with his artillery, and threw mass after mass

upon the breaches which he made. For month after month the assaults of the

Turks were uniformly repelled, until at length the arrival of a Hydriote

squadron forced the Turkish fleet to retire from its position, and made the

situation of Reschid himself one of considerable danger. And now, as winter

approached, and the guerilla bands in the rear of the besiegers grew more

and more active, the Egyptian army with its leader was called from the

Morea to carry out the task in which the Turks had failed. The Hydriote

sea-captains had departed, believing their presence to be no longer needed;

and although they subsequently returned for a short time, their services

were grudgingly rendered and ineffective. Ibrahim, settling down to his

work at the beginning of 1826, conducted his operations with the utmost

vigour, boasting that he would accomplish in fourteen days what the Turks

could not effect in nine months. But his veteran soldiers were thoroughly

defeated when they met the Greeks hand to hand; and the Egyptian, furious

with his enemy, his allies, and his own officers, confessed that

Missolonghi could only be taken by blockade. He now ordered a fleet of

flat-bottomed boats to be constructed and launched upon the lagoons that

lie between Missolonghi and the open sea. Missolonghi was thus completely

surrounded; and when the Greek admirals appeared for the last time and

endeavoured to force an entrance through the shallows, they found the

besieger in full command of waters inaccessible to themselves, and after

one unsuccessful effort abandoned Missolonghi to its fate. In the third

week of April, 1826, exactly a year after the commencement of the siege,

the supply of food was exhausted. The resolution, long made, that the

entire population, men, women, and children, should fall by the enemy's

sword rather than surrender, was now actually carried out. On the night of

the 22nd of April all the Missolonghiots, with the exception of those whom

age, exhaustion, or illness made unable to leave their homes, were drawn up

in bands at the city gates, the women armed and dressed as men, the

children carrying pistols. Preceded by a body of soldiers, they crossed the

moat under Turkish fire. The attack of the vanguard carried everything

before it, and a way was cut through the Turkish lines. But at this moment

some cry of confusion was mistaken by those who were still on the bridges

for an order to retreat. A portion of the non-combatants returned into the

town, and with them the rearguard of the military escort. The leading

divisions, however, continued their march forward, and would have escaped

with the loss of some of the women and children, had not treachery already

made the Turkish commander acquainted with the routes which they intended

to follow. They had cleared the Turkish camp, and were expecting to meet

the bands of Greek armatoli, who had promised to fall upon the enemy's

rear, when, instead of friends, they encountered troop after troop of

Ottoman cavalry and of Albanians placed in ambush along the road between

Missolonghi and the mountains. Here, exhausted and surprised, they were cut

down without mercy, and out of a body numbering several thousand not more

than fifteen hundred men, with a few women and children, ultimately reached

places of safety. Missolonghi itself was entered by the Turks during the

sortie. The soldiers who had fallen back during the confusion on the

bridges, proved that they had not acted from cowardice. They fought

unflinchingly to the last, and three bands, establishing themselves in the

three powder magazines of the town, set fire to them when surrounded by the

Turks, and perished in the explosion Some thousands of women and children

were captured around and within the town, or wandering on the mountains;

but the Turks had few other prisoners. The men were dead or free.

[Fall of the Acropolis of Athens, June 5, 1827.]

From Missolonghi the tide of Ottoman conquest rolled eastward, and the

Acropolis of Athens was in its turn the object of a long and arduous siege.

The Government, which now held scarcely any territory on the mainland

except Nauplia, where it was itself threatened by Ibrahim, made the most

vigorous efforts to prevent the Acropolis from falling into Reschid's

hands. All, however, was in vain. The English officers, Church and

Cochrane, who were now placed at the head of the military and naval forces

of Greece, failed ignominiously in the attacks which they made on Reschid's

besieging army; and the garrison capitulated on June 5, 1827. But the time

was past when the liberation of Greece could be prevented by any Ottoman

victory. The heroic defence of the Missolonghiots had achieved its end.

Greece had fought long enough to enlist the Powers of Europe on its side;

and in the same month that Missolonghi fell the policy of non-intervention

was definitely abandoned by those Governments which were best able to carry

their intentions into effect. If the struggle had ended during the first

three years of the insurrection, no hand would have been raised to prevent

the restoration of the Sultan's rule. Russia then lay as if spell-bound

beneath the diplomacy of the Holy Alliance; and although in the second year

of the war the death of Castlereagh and the accession of Canning to power

had given Greece a powerful friend instead of a powerful foe within the

British Ministry, it was long before England stirred from its neutrality.

Canning indeed made no secret of his sympathies for Greece, and of his

desire to give the weaker belligerent such help as a neutral might afford;

but when he took up office the time had not come when intervention would

have been useful or possible. Changes in the policy of other great Powers

and in the situation of the belligerents themselves were, he considered,

necessary before the influence of England could be successfully employed in

establishing peace in the East.

[First Russian project of joint intervention, 12 Jan., 1824.]

A vigorous movement of public opinion in favour of Greece made itself felt

throughout Western Europe as the struggle continued; and the vivid and

romantic interest excited over the whole civilised world by the death of

Lord Byron in 1823, among the people whom he had come to free, probably

served the Greek cause better than all that Byron could have achieved had

his life been prolonged. In France and England, where public opinion had

great influence on the action of the Government, as well as in Germany,

where it had none whatever, societies were formed for assisting the Greeks

with arms, stores, and money. The first proposal, however, for a joint

intervention in favour of Greece came from St. Petersburg. The undisguised

good-will of Canning towards the insurgents led the Czar's Government to

anticipate that England itself might soon assume that championship of the

Greek cause which Russia, at the bidding of Metternich and of Canning's

predecessor, had up to that time declined. If the Greeks were to be

befriended, it was intolerable that others should play the part of the

patron. Accordingly, on the 12th of January, 1824, a note was submitted in

the Czar's name to all the Courts of Europe, containing a plan for a

settlement of the Greek question, which it was proposed that the great

Powers of Europe should enforce upon Turkey either by means of an armed

demonstration or by the threat of breaking off all diplomatic relations.

According to this scheme, Greece, apart from the islands, was to be divided

into three Principalities, each tributary to the Sultan and garrisoned by

Turkish troops, but in other respects autonomous, like the Principalities

of Moldavia and Wallachia. The islands were to retain their municipal

organisation as before. In one respect this scheme was superior to all that

have succeeded it, for it included in the territory of the Greeks both

Crete and Epirus; in all other respects it was framed in the interest of

Russia alone. Its object was simply to create a second group of provinces,

like those on the Danube, which should afford Russia a constant opportunity

for interfering with the Ottoman Empire, and which at the same time should

prevent the Greeks from establishing an independent and self-supporting

State. The design cannot be called insidious, for its object was so

palpable that not a single politician in Europe was deceived by it; and a

very simple ruse of Metternich's was enough to draw from the Russian

Government an explicit declaration against the independence of Greece,

which was described by the Czar as a mere chimera. But of all the parties

concerned, the Greeks themselves were loudest in denounciation of the

Russian plan. Their Government sent a protest against it to London, and was

assured by Canning in reply that the support of this country should never

be given to any scheme for disposing of the Greeks without their own

consent. Elsewhere the Czar's note was received with expressions of

politeness due to a Court which it might be dangerous to contradict; and a

series of conferences was opened at St. Petersburg for the purpose of

discussing propositions which no one intended to carry into execution.

Though Canning ordered the British ambassador at St. Petersburg to

dissociate himself from these proceedings, the conferences dragged on, with

long adjournments, from the spring of 1824 to the summer of the following

year. [371]

[Discontent and conspiracies in Russia.]

In the meantime a strong spirit of discontent was rising in the Russian

army and nation. The religious feeling no less than the pride of the people

was deeply wounded by Alexander's refusal to aid the Greeks in their

struggle, and by the pitiful results of his attempted diplomatic concert.

Alone among the European nations the Russians understood the ecclesiastical

character of the Greek insurrection, and owed nothing of their sympathy

with it to the spell of classical literature and art. It is characteristic

of the strength of the religious element in the political views of the

Russian people, that the floods of the Neva which overwhelmed St.

Petersburg in the winter of 1825 should have been regarded as a sign of

divine anger at the Czar's inaction in the struggle between the Crescent

and the Cross. But other causes of discontent were not wanting in Russia.

Though Alexander had forgotten his promises to introduce constitutional

rule, there were many, especially in the army, who had not done so.

Officers who served in the invasion of France in 1815, and in the three

years' occupation which followed it, returned from Western Europe with

ideas of social progress and of constitutional rights which they could

never have gathered in their own country. And when the bright hopes which

had been excited by the recognition of these same ideas by the Czar passed

away, and Russia settled down into the routine of despotism and corruption,

the old unquestioning loyalty of the army was no longer proof against the

workings of the revolutionary spirit. In a land where legal means of

opposition to government and of the initiation of reform were wholly

wanting, discontent was forced into its most dangerous form, that of

military conspiracy. The army was honeycombed with secret societies. Both

in the north and in the south of Russia men of influence worked among the

younger officers, and gained a strong body of adherents to their design of

establishing a constitution by force. The southern army contained the most

resolute and daring conspirators. These men had definitely abandoned the

hope of effecting any public reform as long as Alexander lived, and they

determined to sacrifice the sovereign, as his father and others before him

had been sacrificed, to the political necessities of the time. If the

evidence subsequently given by those implicated in the conspiracy is worthy

of credit, a definite plan had been formed for the assassination of the

Czar in the presence of his troops at one of the great reviews intended to

be held in the south of Russia in the autumn of 1825. On the death of the

monarch a provisional government was at once to be established, and a

constitution proclaimed.

[Death of the Czar, Dec. 1, 1825.]

Alexander, aware of the rising indignation of his people, and irritated

beyond endurance by the failure of his diplomatic efforts, had dissolved

the St. Petersburg Conferences in August, 1825, and declared that Russia

would henceforth act according to its own discretion. He quitted St.

Petersburg and travelled to the Black Sea, accompanied by some of the

leaders of the war-party. Here, plunged in a profound melancholy, conscious

that all his early hopes had only served to surround him with conspirators,

and that his sacrifice of Russia's military interests to international

peace had only rendered his country impotent before all Europe, he still

hesitated to make the final determination between peace and war. A certain

mystery hung over his movements, his acts, and his intentions. Suddenly,

while all Europe waited for the signal that should end the interval of

suspense, the news was sent out from a lonely port on the Black Sea that

the Czar was dead. Alexander, still under fifty years of age, had welcomed

the illness which carried him from a world of cares, and closed a career in

which anguish and disappointment had succeeded to such intoxicating glory

and such unbounded hope. Young as he still was for one who had reigned

twenty-four years, Alexander was of all men the most life-weary. Power,

pleasure, excitement, had lavished on him hours of such existence as none

but Napoleon among all his contemporaries had enjoyed. They had left him

nothing but the solace of religious resignation, and the belief that a

Power higher than his own might yet fulfil the purposes in which he himself

had failed. Ever in the midst of great acts and great events, he had missed

greatness himself. Where he had been best was exactly where men inferior to

himself considered him to have been worst--in his hopes; and these hopes he

had himself abandoned and renounced. Strength, insight, unity of purpose,

the qualities which enable men to mould events, appeared in him but

momentarily or in semblance. For want of them the large and fair horizon of

his earlier years was first obscured and then wholly blotted out from his

view, till in the end nothing but his pietism and his generosity

distinguished him from the politicians of repression whose instrument he

had become.

[Military insurrection at St. Petersburg, Dec 26, 1825.]

The sudden death of Alexander threw the Russian Court into the greatest

confusion, for it was not known who was to succeed him. The heir to the

throne was his brother Constantine, an ignorant and brutal savage, who had

just sufficient sense not to desire to be Czar of Russia, though he

considered himself good enough to tyrannise over the Poles. Constantine had

renounced his right to the crown some years before, but the renunciation

had not been made public, nor had the Grand Duke Nicholas, Constantine's

younger brother, been made aware that the succession was irrevocably fixed

upon himself. Accordingly, when the news of Alexander's death reached St.

Petersburg, and the document embodying Constantine's abdication was brought

from the archives by the officials to whose keeping it had been entrusted,

Nicholas refused to acknowledge it as binding, and caused the troops to

take the oath of allegiance to Constantine, who was then at Warsaw.

Constantine, on the other hand, proclaimed his brother emperor. An

interregnum of three weeks followed, during which messages passed between

Warsaw and St. Petersburg, Nicholas positively refusing to accept the crown

unless by his elder brother's direct command. This at length arrived, and

on the 26th of December Nicholas assumed the rank of sovereign. But the

interval of uncertainty had been turned to good account by the conspirators

at St. Petersburg. The oath already taken by the soldiers to Constantine

enabled the officers who were concerned in the plot to denounce Nicholas as

a usurper, and to disguise their real designs under the cloak of loyalty to

the legitimate Czar. Ignorant of the very meaning of a constitution, the

common soldiers mutinied because they were told to do so; and it is said

that they shouted the word Constitution, believing it to be the name of

Constantine's wife. When summoned to take the oath to Nicholas, the Moscow

Regiment refused it, and marched off to the place in front of the Senate

House, where it formed square, and repulsed an attack made upon it by the

Cavalry of the Guard. Companies from other regiments now joined the

mutineers, and symptoms of insurrection began to show themselves among the

civil population. Nicholas himself did not display the energy of character

which distinguished him through all his later life; on the contrary, his

attitude was for some time rather that of resignation than of

self-confidence. Whether some doubt as to the justice of his cause haunted

him, or a trial like that to which he was now exposed was necessary to

bring to its full strength the iron quality of his nature, it is certain

that the conduct of the new Czar during these critical hours gave to those

around him little indication of the indomitable will which was hence forth

to govern Russia. Though the great mass of the army remained obedient, it

was but slowly brought up to the scene of revolt. Officers of high rank

were sent to harangue the insurgents, and one of these, General

Miloradovitsch, a veteran of the Napoleonic campaigns, was mortally wounded

while endeavouring to make himself heard. It was not until evening that the

artillery was ordered into action, and the command given by the Czar to

fire grape-shot among the insurgents. The effect was decisive. The

mutineers fled before a fire which they were unable to return, and within a

few minutes the insurrection was over. It had possessed no chief of any

military capacity; its leaders were missing at the moment when a forward

march or an attack on the palace of the Czar might have given them the

victory; and among the soldiers at large there was not the least desire to

take part in any movement against the established system of Russia. The

only effect left by the conspiracy within Russia itself was seen in the

rigorous and uncompromising severity with which Nicholas henceforward

enforced the principle of autocratic rule. The illusions of the previous

reign were at an end. A man with the education and the ideas of a

drill-sergeant and the religious assurance of a Covenanter was on the

throne; rebellion had done its worst against him; and woe to those who in

future should deviate a hair's breadth from their duty of implicit

obedience to the sovereign's all-sufficing power. [372]

[Anglo-Russian Protocol, April 4, 1826.]

It has been stated, and with some probability of truth, that the military

insurrection of 1825 disposed the new Czar to a more vigorous policy

abroad. The conspirators, when on their trial, declared it to have been

their intention to throw the army at once into an attack upon the Turks;

and in so doing they would certainly have had the feeling of the nation on

their side. Nicholas himself had little or no sympathy for the Greeks. They

were a democratic people, and the freedom which they sought to gain was

nothing but anarchy. "Do not speak of the Greeks," he said to the

representative of a foreign power, "I call them the rebels." Nevertheless,

little as Nicholas wished to serve the Greek democracy, both inclination

and policy urged him to make an end of his predecessor's faint-hearted

system of negotiation, and to bring the struggle in the East to a summary

close. Canning had already, in conversation with the Russian ambassador at

London, discussed a possible change of policy on the part of the two rival

Courts. He now saw that time had come for establishing new relations

between Great Britain and Russia, and for attempting that co-operation in

the East which he had held to be impracticable during Alexander's reign.

The Duke of Wellington was sent to St. Petersburg, nominally to offer the

usual congratulations to the new sovereign, in reality to dissuade him from

going to war, and to propose either the separate intervention of England or

a joint intervention by England and Russia on behalf of Greece. The mission

was successful. It was in vain that Metternich endeavoured to entangle the

new Czar in the diplomatic web that had so long held his predecessor. The

spell of the Holy Alliance was broken. Nicholas looked on the past

influence of Austria on the Eastern Question only with resentment; he would

hear of no more conferences of ambassadors; and on the 4th of April, 1826,

a Protocol was signed at St. Petersburg, by which Great Britain and Russia

fixed the conditions under which the mediation of the former Power was to

be tendered to the Porte. Greece was to remain tributary to the Sultan; it

was, however, to be governed by its own elected authorities, and to be

completely independent in its commercial relations. The policy known in our

own day as that of bag-and-baggage expulsion was to be carried out in a far

more extended sense than that in which it has been advocated by more recent

champions of the subject races of the East; the Protocol of 1826

stipulating for the removal not only of Turkish officials but of the entire

surviving Turkish population of Greece. All property belonging to the

Turks, whether on the continent or in the islands, was to be purchased by

the Greeks. [373]

Thus was the first step taken in the negotiations which ended in the

establishment of Hellenic independence. The Protocol, which had been

secretly signed, was submitted after some interval to the other Courts of

Europe. At Vienna it was received with the utmost disgust. Metternich had

at first declared the union of England and Russia to be an impossibility.

When this union was actually established, no language was sufficiently

strong to express his mortification and his spite. At one moment he

declared that Canning was a revolutionist who had entrapped the young and

inexperienced Czar into an alliance with European radicalism; at another,

that England had made itself the cat's-paw of Russian ambition. Not till

now, he protested, could Europe understand what it had lost in Castlereagh.

Nor did Metternich confine himself to lamentations. While his

representatives at Paris and Berlin spared no effort to excite the

suspicion of those Courts against the Anglo-Russian project of

intervention, the Austrian ambassador at London worked upon King George's

personal hostility to Canning, and conspired against the Minister with that

important section of the English aristocracy which was still influenced by

the traditional regard for Austria. Berlin, however, was the only field

where Metternich's diplomacy still held its own. King Frederick William had

not yet had time to acquire the habit of submission to the young Czar

Nicholas, and was therefore saved the pain of deciding which of two masters

he should obey. In spite of his own sympathy for the Greeks, he declined to

connect Prussia with the proposed joint-intervention, and remained passive,

justifying this course by the absence of any material interests of Prussia

in the East. Being neither a neighbour of the Ottoman Empire nor a maritime

Power, Prussia had in fact no direct means of making its influence felt.

[Treaty between England, Russia and France, July, 1827.]

France, on whose action much more depended, was now governed wholly in the

interests of the Legitimist party. Louis XVIII. had died in 1824, and the

Count of Artois had succeeded to the throne, under the title of Charles X.

The principles of the Legitimists would logically have made them defenders

of the hereditary rights of the Sultan against his rebellious subjects; but

the Sultan, unlike Ferdinand of Spain, was not a Bourbon nor even a

Christian; and in a case where the legitimate prince was an infidel and the

rebels were Christians, the conscience of the most pious Legitimist might

well recoil from the perilous task of deciding between the divine rights of

the Crown and the divine rights of the Church, and choose, in so painful an

emergency, the simpler course of gratifying the national love of action.

There existed, both among Liberals and among Ultramontanes, a real sympathy

for Greece, and this interest was almost the only one in which all French

political sections felt that they had something in common. Liberals

rejoiced in the prospect of making a new free State in Europe; Catholics,

like Charles X. himself, remembered Saint Louis and the Crusades;

diplomatists understood the extreme importance of the impending breach

between Austria and Russia, and of the opportunity of allying France with

the latter Power. Thus the natural and disinterested impulse of the greater

part of the public coincided exactly with the dictates of a far-seeing

policy; and the Government, in spite of its Legitimist principles and of

some assurances given to Metternich in person when he visited Paris in

1825, determined to accept the policy of the Anglo-Russian intervention in

the East, and to participate in the active measures about to be taken by

the two Powers. The Protocol of St. Petersburg formed the basis of a

definitive treaty which was signed at London in July, 1827. By this act

England, Russia, and France undertook to put an end to the conflict in the

East, which, through the injury done to the commerce of all nations, had

become a matter of European concern. The contending parties were to be

summoned to accept the mediation of the Powers and to consent to an

armistice. Greece was to be made autonomous, under the paramount

sovereignty of the Sultan; the Mohammedan population of the Greek provinces

was, as in the Protocol of St. Petersburg, to be entirely removed; and the

Greeks were to enter upon possession of all Turkish property within their

limits, paying an indemnity to the former owners. Each of the three

contracting Governments pledged itself to seek no increase of territory in

the East, and no special commercial advantages. In the secret articles of

the treaty provisions were made for the case of the rejection by the Turks

of the proposed offer of mediation. Should the armistice not be granted

within one month, the Powers agreed that they would announce to each

belligerent their intention to prevent further encounters, and that they

would take the necessary steps for enforcing this declaration, without,

however, taking part in hostilities themselves. Instructions in conformity

with the Treaty were to be sent to the Admirals commanding the

Mediterranean squadrons of the three Powers. [374]

[Death of Canning, August, 1827.]

[Policy of Canning.]

Scarcely was the Treaty of London signed when Canning died. He had

definitely broken from the policy of his predecessors, that policy which,

for the sake of guarding against Russia's advance, had condemned the

Christian races of the East to 1827. eternal subjection to the Turk, and

bound up Great Britain with the Austrian system of resistance to the very

principle and name of national independence. Canning was no blind friend to

Russia. As keenly as any of his adversaries he appreciated the importance

of England's interests in the East; of all English statesmen of that time

he would have been the last to submit to any diminution of England's just

influence or power. But, unlike his predecessors, he saw that there were

great forces at work which, whether with England's concurrence or in spite

of it, would accomplish that revolution in the East for which the time was

now come; and he was statesman enough not to acquiesce in the belief that

the welfare of England was in permanent and necessary antagonism to the

moral interests of mankind and the better spirit of the age. Therefore,

instead of attempting to maintain the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, or

holding aloof and resorting to threats and armaments while Russia

accomplished the liberation of Greece by itself, he united with Russia in

this work, and relied on concerted action as the best preventive against

the undue extension of Russia's influence in the East. In committing

England to armed intervention, Canning no doubt hoped that the settlement

of the Greek question arranged by the Powers would be peacefully accepted

by the Sultan, and that a separate war between Russia and the Porte, on

this or any other issue, would be averted. Neither of these hopes was

realised. The joint-intervention had to be enforced by arms, and no sooner

had the Allies struck their common blow than a war between Turkey and

Russia followed. How far the course of events might have been modified had

Canning's life not been cut short it is impossible to say; but whether his

statesmanship might or might not have averted war on the Danube, the

balance of results proved his policy to have been the right one. Greece was

established as an independent State, to supply in the future a valuable

element of resistance to Slavic preponderance in the Levant; and the

encounter between Russia and Turkey, so long dreaded, produced none of

those disastrous effects which had been anticipated from it. On the

relative value of Canning's statesmanship as compared with that of his

predecessors, the mind of England and of Europe has long been made up. He

stands among those who have given to this country its claim to the respect

of mankind. His monument, as well as his justification, is the existence of

national freedom in the East; and when half a century later a British

Government reverted to the principle of non-intervention, as it had been

understood by Castlereagh, and declined to enter into any effective

co-operation with Russia for the emancipation of Bulgaria, even then, when

the precedent of Canning's action in 1827 stood in direct and glaring

contradiction to the policy of the hour, no effective attempt was made by

the leaders of the party to which Canning had belonged to impugn his

authority, or to explain away his example. It might indeed be alleged that

Canning had not explicitly resolved on the application of force; but those

who could maintain that Canning would, like Wellington, have used the

language of apology and regret when Turkish obstinacy had made it

impossible to effect the object of his intervention by any other means, had

indeed read the history of Canning's career in vain. [375]

[Intervention of the Admirals, Sept., 1827.]

The death of Canning, which brought his rival, the Duke of Wellington,

after a short interval to the head of affairs, caused at the moment no

avowed change in the execution of his plans. In accordance with the

provisions of the Treaty of London the mediation of the allied Powers was

at once tendered to the belligerents, and an armistice demanded. The

armistice was accepted by the Greeks; it was contemptuously refused by the

Turks. In consequence of this refusal the state of war continued, as it

would have been absurd to ask the Greeks to sit still and be massacred

because the enemy declined to lay down his arms. The Turk being the party

resisting the mediation agreed upon, it became necessary to deprive him of

the power of continuing hostilities. Heavy reinforcements had just arrived

from Egypt, and an expedition was on the point of sailing from Navarino,

the gathering place of Ibrahim's forces, against Hydra, the capture of

which would have definitely made an end of the Greek insurrection. Admiral

Codrington, the commander of the British fleet, and the French Admiral De

Rigny, were now off the coast of Greece. They addressed themselves to

Ibrahim, and required from him a promise that he would make no movement

until further orders should arrive from Constantinople. Ibrahim made this

promise verbally on the 25th of September. A few days later, however,

Ibrahim learnt that while he himself was compelled to be inactive, the

Greeks, continuing hostilities as they were entitled to do, had won a

brilliant naval victory under Captain Hastings within the Gulf of Corinth.

Unable to control his anger, he sailed out from the harbour of Navarino,

and made for Patras. Codrington, who had stationed his fleet at Zante,

heard of the movement, and at once threw himself across the track of the

Egyptian, whom he compelled to turn back by an energetic threat to sink his

fleet. Had the French and Russian contingents been at hand, Codrington

would have taken advantage of Ibrahim's sortie to cut him off from all

Greek harbours, and to force him to return direct to Alexandria, thus

peaceably accomplishing the object of the intervention. This, however, to

the misfortune of Ibrahim's seamen, the English admiral could not do alone.

Ibrahim re-entered Navarino, and there found the orders of the Sultan for

which it had been agreed that he should wait. These orders were dictated by

true Turkish infatuation. They bade Ibrahim continue the subjugation of the

Morea with the utmost vigour, and promised him the assistance of Reschid

Pasha, his rival in the siege of Missolonghi. Ibrahim, perfectly reckless

of the consequences, now sent out his devastating columns again. No life,

and nothing that could support life, was spared. Not only were the crops

ravaged, but the fruit-trees, which are the permanent support of the

country, were cut down at the roots. Clouds of fire and smoke from burning

villages showed the English officers who approached the coast in what

spirit the Turk met their proposals for a pacification. "It is supposed

that if Ibrahim remained in Greece," wrote Captain Hamilton, "more than a

third of its inhabitants would die of absolute starvation."

[Battle of Navarino, Oct. 20th, 1827.]

It became necessary to act quickly, the more so as the season was far

advanced, and a winter blockade of Ibrahim's fleet was impossible. A

message was sent to the Egyptian head-quarters, requiring that hostilities

should cease, that the Morea should be evacuated, and the Turko-Egyptian

fleet return to Constantinople and Alexandria. In answer to this message

there came back a statement that Ibrahim had left Navarino for the interior

of the country, and that it was not known where to find him. Nothing now

remained for the admirals but to make their presence felt. On the 18th of

October it was resolved that the English, French, and Russian fleets, which

were now united, should enter the harbour of Navarino in battle order. The

movement was called a demonstration, and in so far as the admirals had not

actually determined upon making an attack, it was not directly a hostile

measure; but every gun was ready to open fire, and it was well understood

that any act of resistance on the part of the opposite fleet would result

in hostilities. Codrington, as senior officer, took command of the allied

squadron, and the instructions which he gave to his colleagues for the

event of a general engagement concluded with Nelson's words, that no

captain could do very wrong who placed his ship alongside that of an enemy.

Thus, ready to strike hard, the English admiral sailed into the harbour of

Navarino at noon on October 20, followed by the French and the Russians.

The allied fleet advanced to within pistol-shot of the Ottoman ships and

there anchored. A little to the windward of the position assigned to the

English corvette _Dartmouth_ there lay a Turkish fire-ship. A request

was made that this dangerous vessel might be removed to a safer distance;

it was refused, and a boat's crew was then sent to cut its cable. The boat

was received with musketry fire. This was answered by the _Dartmouth_

and by a French ship, and the battle soon became general. Codrington, still

desirous to avoid bloodshed, sent his pilot to Moharem Bey, who commanded

in Ibrahim's absence, proposing to withhold fire on both sides. Moharem

replied with cannon-shot, killing the pilot and striking Codrington's own

vessel. This exhausted the patience of the English admiral, who forthwith

made his adversary a mere wreck. The entire fleets on both sides were now

engaged. The Turks had a superiority of eight hundred guns, and fought with

courage. For four hours the battle raged at close quarters in the

land-locked harbour, while twenty thousand of Ibrahim's soldiers watched

from the surrounding hills the struggle in which they could take no part.

But the result of the combat was never for a moment doubtful. The confusion

and bad discipline of the Turkish fleet made it an easy prey. Vessel after

vessel was sunk or blown to pieces, and before evening fell the work of the

allies was done. When Ibrahim returned from his journey on the following

day he found the harbour of Navarino strewed with wrecks and dead bodies.

Four thousand of his seamen had fallen; the fleet which was to have

accomplished the reduction of Hydra was utterly ruined. [376]

[Inaction of England after Navarino.]

Over all Greece it was at once felt that the nation was saved. The

intervention of the Powers had been sudden and decisive beyond the most

sanguine hopes; and though this intervention might be intended to establish

something less than the complete independence of Greece, the violence of

the first collision bade fair to carry the work far beyond the bounds

originally assigned to it. The attitude of the Porte after the news of the

battle of Navarino reached Constantinople was exactly that which its worst

enemies might have desired. So far from abating anything in its resistance

to the mediation of the three Powers, it declared the attack made upon its

navy to be a crime and an outrage, and claimed satisfaction for it from the

ambassadors of the Allied Powers. Arguments proved useless, and the united

demand for an armistice with the Greeks having been finally and

contemptuously refused, the ambassadors, in accordance with their

instructions, quitted the Turkish capital (Dec. 8). Had Canning been still

living, it is probable that the first blow of Navarino would have been

immediately followed by the measures necessary to make the Sultan submit to

the Treaty of London, and that the forces of Great Britain would have been

applied with sufficient vigour to render any isolated action on the part of

Russia both unnecessary and impossible. But at this critical moment a

paralysis fell over the English Government. Canning's policy was so much

his own, he had dragged his colleagues so forcibly with him in spite of

themselves, that when his place was left empty no one had the courage

either to fulfil or to reverse his intentions, and the men who succeeded

him acted as if they were trespassers in the fortress which Canning had

taken by storm. The very ground on which Wellington, no less than Canning,

had justified the agreement made with Russia in 1826 was the necessity of

preventing Russia from acting alone; and when Russian and Turkish ships had

actually fought at Navarino, and war was all but formally declared, it

became more imperative than ever that Great Britain should keep the most

vigorous hold upon its rival, and by steady, consistent pressure let it be

known to both Turks and Russians that the terms of the Treaty of London and

no others must be enforced. To retire from action immediately after dealing

the Sultan one dire, irrevocable blow, without following up this stroke or

attaining the end agreed upon--to leave Russia to take up the armed

compulsion where England had dropped it, and to win from its crippled

adversary the gains of a private and isolated war--was surely the weakest

of all possible policies that could have been adopted. Yet this was the

policy followed by English Ministers during that interval of transition and

incoherence that passed between Canning's death and the introduction of the

Reform Bill.

[War between Russia and Turkey, April, 1828.]

By the Russian Government nothing was more ardently desired than a contest

with Turkey, in which England and France, after they had destroyed the

Turkish fleet, should be mere on-lookers, debarred by the folly of the

Porte itself from prohibiting or controlling hostilities between it and its

neighbour. There might indeed be some want of a pretext for war, since all

the points of contention between Russia and Turkey other than those

relating to Greece had been finally settled in Russia's favour by a Treaty

signed at Akerman in October, 1826. But the spirit of infatuation had

seized the Sultan, or a secret hope that the Western Powers would in the

last resort throw over the Court of St. Petersburg led him to hurry on

hostilities by a direct challenge to Russia. A proclamation which reads

like the work of some frantic dervish, though said to have been composed by

Mahmud himself, called the Mussulman world to arms. Russia was denounced as

the instigator of the Greek rebellion, and the arch-enemy of Islam. The

Treaty of Akerman was declared to have been extorted by compulsion and to

have been signed only for the purpose of gaining time. "Russia has imparted

its own madness to the other Powers and persuaded them to make an alliance

to free the Rayah from his Ottoman master. But the Turk does not count his

enemies. The law forbids the people of Islam to permit any injury to be

done to their religion; and if all the unbelievers together unite against

them, they will enter on the war as a sacred duty, and trust in God for

protection." This proclamation was followed by a levy of troops and the

expulsion of most of the Christian residents in Constantinople. Russia

needed no other pretext. The fanatical outburst of the Sultan was treated

by the Court of St. Petersburg as if it had been the deliberate expression

of some civilised Power, and was answered on the 26th of April, 1828, by a

declaration of war. In order to soften the effect of this step and to reap

the full benefit of its subsisting relations with France and England,

Russia gave a provisional undertaking to confine its operations as a

belligerent to the mainland and the Black Sea, and within the Mediterranean

to act still as one of the allied neutrals under the terms of the Treaty of

London.

[Military condition of Turkey.]

The moment seized by Russia for the declaration of war was one singularly

favourable to itself and unfortunate for its adversary. Not only had the

Turkish fleet been destroyed by the neutrals, but the old Turkish force of

the Janissaries had been destroyed by its own master, and the new-modelled

regiments which were to replace it had not yet been organised. The Sultan

had determined in 1826 to postpone his long-planned military reform no

longer, and to stake everything on one bold stroke against the Janissaries.

Troops enough were brought up from the other side of the Bosphorus to make

Mahmud certain of victory. The Janissaries were summoned to contribute a

proportion of their number to the regiments about to be formed on the

European pattern; and when they proudly refused to do so and raised the

standard of open rebellion they were cut to pieces and exterminated by

Mahmud's Anatolian soldiers in the midst of Constantinople. [377] The

principal difficulty in the way of a reform of the Turkish army was thus

removed and the work of reorganisation was earnestly taken in hand; but

before there was time to complete it the enemy entered the field. Mahmud

had to meet the attack of Russia with an army greatly diminished in number,

and confused by the admixture of European and Turkish discipline. The

resources of the empire were exhausted by the long struggle with Greece,

and, above all, the destruction of the Janissaries had left behind it an

exasperation which made the Sultan believe that rebellion might at any

moment break out in his own capital. Nevertheless, in spite of its inherent

weakness and of all the disadvantages under which it entered into war,

Turkey succeeded in prolonging its resistance through two campaigns, and

might, with better counsels, have tried the fortune of a third.

[Military condition of Russia.]

The actual military resources of Russia were in 1828 much below what they

were believed to be by all Europe. The destruction of Napoleon's army in

1812 and the subsequent exploits of Alexander in the campaigns which ended

in the capture of Paris had left behind them an impression of Russian

energy and power which was far from corresponding with the reality, and

which, though disturbed by the events of 1828, had by no means vanished at

the time of the Crimean War. The courage and patience of the Russian

soldier were certainly not over-rated; but the progress supposed to have

been made in Russian military organisation since the campaign of 1799, when

it was regarded in England and Austria as little above that of savages, was

for the most part imaginary. The proofs of a radically bad system--scanty

numbers, failing supplies, immense sickness--were never more conspicuous

than in 1828. Though Russia had been preparing for war for at least seven

years, scarcely seventy thousand soldiers could be collected on the Pruth.

The general was Wittgenstein, one of the heroes of 1812, but now a veteran

past effective work. Nicholas came to the camp to make things worse by

headstrong interference. The best Russian officer, Paskiewitsch, was put in

command of the forces about to operate in Asia Minor, and there, thrown on

his own resources and free to create a system of his own, he achieved

results in strong contrast to the failure of the Russian arms on the

Danube.

[Campaign of 1828.]

In entering on the campaign of 1828, it was necessary for the Czar to avoid

giving any unnecessary causes of anxiety to Austria, which had already made

unsuccessful attempts to form a coalition against him. The line of

operations was therefore removed as far as possible from the Austrian

frontier; and after the Roumanian principalities had been peacefully

occupied, the Danube was crossed at a short distance above the point where

its mouths divide (June 7). The Turks had no intention of meeting the enemy

in a pitched battle; they confined themselves to the defence of fortresses,

the form of warfare to which, since the decline of the military art in

Turkey, the patience and abstemiousness of the race best fit them. Ibraila

and Silistria on the Danube, Varna and Shumla in the neighbourhood of the

Balkans, were their principal strongholds; of these Ibraila was at once

besieged by a considerable force, while Silistria was watched by a weak

contingent, and the vanguard of the Russian army pushed on through the

Dobrudscha towards the Black Sea, where, with the capture of the minor

coast-towns, it expected to enter into communication with the fleet. The

first few weeks of the campaign were marked by considerable successes.

Ibraila capitulated on the 18th of June, and the military posts in the

Dobrudscha fell one after another into the hands of the invaders, who met

with no effective resistance in this district. But their serious work was

only now beginning. The Russian army, in spite of its weakness, was divided

into three parts, occupied severally in front of Silistria, Shumla, and

Varna. At Shumla the mass of the Turkish army, under Omer Brionis, was

concentrated. The force brought against it by the invader was inadequate to

its task, and the attempts which were made to lure the Turkish army from

its entrenched camp into the open field proved unsuccessful. The

difficulties of the siege proved so great that Wittgenstein after a while

proposed to abandon offensive operations at this point, and to leave a mere

corps of observation before the enemy until Varna should have fallen. This,

however, was forbidden by the Czar. As the Russians wasted away before

Shumla with sickness and fatigue, the Turks gained strength, and on the

24th of September Omer broke out from his entrenchments and moved eastwards

to the relief of Varna. Nicholas again over-ruled his generals, and ordered

his cousin, Prince Eugene of Würtemberg, to attack the advancing Ottomans

with the troops then actually at his disposal. Eugene did so, and suffered

a severe defeat. A vigorous movement of the Turks would probably have made

an end of the campaign, but Omer held back at the critical moment, and on

the 10th of October Varna surrendered. This, however, was the only conquest

made by the Russians. The season was too far advanced for them either to

cross the Balkans or to push forward operations against the uncaptured

fortresses. Shumla and Silistria remained in the hands of their defenders,

and the Russians, after suffering enormous losses in proportion to the

smallness of their numbers, withdrew to Varna and the Danube, to resume the

campaign in the spring of the following year. [378]

[Campaign of 1829.]

The spirits of the Turks and of their European friends were raised by the

unexpected failure of the Czar's arms. Metternich resumed his efforts to

form a coalition, and tempted French Ministers with the prospect of

recovering the Rhenish provinces, but in vain. The Sultan began

negotiations, but broke them off when he found that the events of the

campaign had made no difference in the enemy's tone. The prestige of Russia

was in fact at stake, and Nicholas would probably have faced a war with

Austria and Turkey combined rather than have made peace without restoring

the much-diminished reputation of his troops. The winter was therefore

spent in bringing up distant reserves. Wittgenstein was removed from his

command; the Czar withdrew from military operations in which he had done

nothing but mischief; and Diebitsch, a Prussian by birth and training, was

placed at the head of the army, untrammelled by the sovereign presence or

counsels which had hampered his predecessor. The intention of the new

commander was to cross the Balkans as soon as Silistria should have fallen,

without waiting for the capture of Shumla. In pursuance of this design the

fleet was despatched early in the spring of 1829 to seize a port beyond the

mountain-range. Diebitsch then placed a corps in front of Silistria, and

made his preparations for the southward march; but before any progress had

been made in the siege the Turks themselves took the field. Reschid Pasha,

now Grand Vizier, moved eastwards from Shumla at the beginning of May

against the weak Russian contingent that still lay in winter quarters

between that place and Varna. The superiority of his force promised him

an easy victory; but after winning some unimportant successes, and

advancing to a considerable distance from his stronghold, he allowed

himself to be held at bay until Diebitsch, with the army of the Danube,

was ready to fall upon his rear. The errors of the Turks had given to the

Russian commander, who hastened across Bulgaria on hearing of his

colleague's peril, the choice of destroying their army, or of seizing

Shumla by a _coup-de-main_. Diebitsch determined upon attacking his

enemy in the open field, and on the 10th of June Reschid's army, attempting

to regain the roads to Shumla, was put to total rout at Kulewtscha. A

fortnight later Silistria surrendered, and Diebitsch, reinforced by the

troops that had besieged that fortress, was now able to commence his

march across the Balkans.

[Crossing of the Balkans, July, 1829.]

Rumour magnified into hundreds of thousands the scanty columns which for

the first time carried the Russian flag over the Balkan range. Resistance

everywhere collapsed. The mountains were crossed without difficulty, and on

the 19th of August the invaders appeared before Adrianople, which

immediately surrendered. Putting on the boldest countenance in order to

conceal his real weakness, Diebitsch now struck out right and left, and

sent detachments both to the Euxine and the Ægæan coast. The fleet

co-operated with him, and the ports of the Black Sea, almost as far south

as the Bosphorus, fell into the invaders' hands. The centre of the army

began to march upon Constantinople. If the Sultan had known the real

numbers of the force which threatened his capital, a force not exceeding

twenty thousand men, he would probably have recognised that his assailant's

position was a more dangerous one than his own. Diebitsch had advanced into

the heart of the enemy's country with a mere handful of men. Sickness was

daily thinning his ranks; his troops were dispersed over a wide area from

sea to sea; and the warlike tribes of Albania threatened to fall upon his

communications from the west. For a moment the Sultan spoke of fighting

upon the walls of Constantinople; but the fear of rebellion within his own

capital, the discovery of conspiracies, and the disasters sustained by his

arms in Asia, where Kars and Erzeroum had fallen into the enemy's hands,

soon led him to make overtures of peace and to accept the moderate terms

which the Russian Government, aware of its own difficulties, was willing to

grant. It would have been folly for the Czar to stimulate the growing

suspicion of England and to court the attack of Austria by prolonging

hostilities; and although King Charles X. and the French Cabinet, reverting

to the ideas of Tilsit, proposed a partition of the Ottoman Empire, and a

general re-arrangement of the map of Europe which would have given Belgium

and the Palatinate to France, the plan was originated too late to produce

any effect. [379] Russia had everything to lose and nothing to gain by a

European war. It had reduced Turkey to submission, and might fairly hope to

maintain its ascendency at Constantinople during coming years without

making any of those great territorial changes which would have given its

rivals a pretext for intervening on the Sultan's behalf. Under the guise of

a generous forbearance the Czar extricated himself from a dangerous

position with credit and advantage. As much had been won as could be

maintained without hazard; and on the 14th of September peace was concluded

in Adrianople.

[Treaty of Adrianople, Sept. 14, 1829.]

The Treaty of Adrianople gave Russia a slight increase of territory in

Asia, incorporating with the Czar's dominions the ports of Anapa and Poti

on the eastern coast of the Black Sea; but its most important provisions

were those which confirmed and extended the Protectorate exercised by the

Czar over the Danubian Principalities, and guaranteed the commercial rights

of Russian subjects throughout the Ottoman Empire both by land and sea. In

order more effectively to exclude the Sultan's influence from Wallachia and

Moldavia, the office of Hospodar, hitherto tenable for seven years, was now

made an appointment for life, and the Sultan specifically engaged to permit

no interference on the part of his neighbouring Pashas with the affairs of

these provinces. No fortified point was to be retained by the Turks on the

left bank of the Danube; no Mussulman was to be permitted to reside within

the Principalities; and those possessing landed estates there were to sell

them within eighteen months. The Porte pledged itself never again to detain

Russian ships of commerce coming from the Black Sea, and acknowledged that

such an act would amount to an infraction of treaties justifying Russia in

having recourse to reprisals. The Straits of Constantinople and the

Dardanelles were declared free and open to the merchant ships of all Powers

at peace with the Porte, upon the same conditions which were stipulated for

vessels under the Russian flag. The same freedom of trade and navigation

was recognised within the Black Sea. All treaties and conventions hitherto

concluded between Turkey and Russia were recognised as in force, except in

so far as modified by the present agreement. The Porte further gave its

adhesion to the Treaty of London relating to Greece, and to an Act entered

into by the Allied Powers in March, 1829, for regulating the Greek

frontier. An indemnity in money was declared to be owing to Russia; and as

the amount of this remained to be fixed by mutual agreement, the means were

still left open to the Russian Government for exercising a gentle pressure

at Constantinople, or for rewarding the compliance of the conquered. [380]

[Capodistrias elected President of Greece, April, 1827.]

The war between Turkey and Russia, while it left the European frontier

between the belligerents unchanged, exercised a two-fold influence upon the

settlement of Greece. On the one hand, by exciting the fears and suspicions

of Great Britain, it caused the Government of our own country, under the

Duke of Wellington, to insist on the limitation of the Greek State to the

narrowest possible area; [381] on the other hand, by reducing Turkey itself

almost to the condition of a Russian dependency, it led to the abandonment

of the desire to maintain the Sultan's supremacy in any form over the

emancipated provinces, and resulted in the establishment of an absolutely

independent Hellenic kingdom. An important change had taken place within

Greece itself just at the time when the allied Powers determined upon

intervention. The parts of the local leaders were played out, and in April,

1827, Capodistrias, ex-Minister of Russia, was elected President for seven

years. Capodistrias accepted the call. He was then, as he had been

throughout the insurrection, at a distance from Greece; and before making

his way thither, he visited the principal Courts of Europe, with the view

of ascertaining what moral or financial support he should be likely to

receive from them. His interview with the Czar Nicholas led to a clear

statement by that sovereign of the conditions which he expected

Capodistrias, in return for Russia's continued friendship, to fulfil.

Greece was to be rescued from revolution: in other words, personal was to

be substituted for popular government. The State was to remain tributary to

the Sultan: that is, in both Greece and Turkey the door was to be kept open

for Russia's interference. Whether Capodistrias had any intention of

fulfilling the latter condition is doubtful. His love for Greece and his

own personal ambition prevented his regard for Russia, strong though this

might be, from making him the mere instrument of the Court of St.

Petersburg; and while outwardly acquiescing in the Czar's decision that

Greece should remain a tributary State, he probably resolved from the first

to aim at establishing its complete independence. With regard to the Czar's

demand that the system of local self-government should be superseded within

Greece itself by one of autocratic rule, Capodistrias was in harmony with

his patron. He had been the Minister of a centralised despotism himself.

His experience was wholly that of the official of an absolute sovereign;

and although Capodistrias had represented the more liberal tendencies of

the Russian Court when it was a question of arguing against Metternich

about the complete or the partial restoration of despotic rule in Italy, he

had no real acquaintance and no real sympathy with the action of free

institutions, and moved in the same circle of ideas as the autocratic

reformers of the eighteenth century, of whom Joseph II. was the type. [382]

[The Protocols of Nov., 1828, and March, 1829.]

The Turks were still masters of the Morea when Capodistrias reached Greece.

The battle of Navarino had not caused Ibrahim to relax his hold upon the

fortresses, and it was deemed necessary by the Allies to send a French

army-corps to dislodge him from his position. This expeditionary force,

under General Maison, landed in Greece in the summer of 1828, and Ibrahim,

not wishing to fight to the bitter end, contented himself with burning

Tripolitza to the ground and sowing it with salt, and then withdrew. The

war between Turkey and Russia had now begun. Capodistrias assisted the

Russian fleet in blockading the Dardanelles, and thereby gained for himself

the marked ill-will of the British Government. At a conference held in

London by the representatives of France, England, and Russia, in November,

1828, it was resolved that the operations of the Allies should be limited

to the Morea and the islands. Capodistrias, in consequence of this

decision, took the most vigorous measures for continuing the war against

Turkey. What the allies refused to guarantee must be won by force of arms;

and during the winter of 1829, while Russia pressed upon Turkey from the

Danube, Capodistrias succeeded in reconquering Missolonghi and the whole

tract of country immediately to the north of the Gulf of Corinth. The

Porte, in prolonging its resistance after the November conference, played

as usual into its enemy's hands. The negotiations at London were resumed in

a spirit somewhat more favourable to Greece, and a Protocol was signed on

the 22nd of March, 1829, extending the northern frontier of Greece up to a

line drawn from the Gulf of Arta to the Gulf of Volo. Greece, according to

this Protocol, was still to remain under the Sultan's suzerainty: its ruler

was to be a hereditary prince belonging to one of the reigning European

families, but not to any of the three allied Courts. [383]

[Leopold accepts the Greek Crown, Feb., 1830.]

The mediation of Great Britain was now offered to the Porte upon the terms

thus laid down, and for the fourteenth time its mediation was rejected. But

the end was near at hand. Diebitsch crossed the Balkans, and it was in vain

that the Sultan then proposed the terms which he had scouted in November.

The Treaty of Adrianople enforced the decisions of the March Protocol.

Greece escaped from a limitation of its frontier, which would have left

both Athens and Missolonghi Turkish territory. The principle of the

admission of the provinces north of the Gulf of Corinth within the Hellenic

State was established, and nothing remained for the friends of the Porte

but to cut down to the narrowest possible area the district which had been

loosely indicated in the London Protocol. While Russia, satisfied with its

own successes against the Ottoman Empire and anxious to play the part of

patron of the conquered, ceased to interest itself in Greece, the

Government of Great Britain contested every inch of territory proposed to

be ceded to the new State, and finally induced the Powers to agree upon a

boundary-line which did not even in letter fulfil the conditions of the

treaty. Northern Acarnania and part of Ætolia were severed from Greece,

and the frontier was drawn from the mouth of the river Achelous to a spot

near Thermopylae. On the other hand, as Russian influence now appeared to

be firmly established and likely to remain paramount at Constantinople, the

Western Powers had no motive to maintain the Sultan's supremacy over

Greece. This was accordingly by common consent abandoned; and the Hellenic

Kingdom, confined within miserably narrow limits on the mainland, and

including neither Crete nor Samos among its islands, was ultimately offered

in full sovereignty to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, the widower of

Charlotte, daughter of George IV. After some negotiations, in which Leopold

vainly asked for a better frontier, he accepted the Greek crown on the 11th

of February, 1830.

[Government of Capodistrias.]

In the meantime, Capodistrias was struggling hard to govern and to organise

according to his own conceptions a land in which every element of anarchy,

ruin, and confusion appeared to be arrayed against the restoration of

civilised life. The country was devastated, depopulated, and in some places

utterly barbarised. Out of a population of little more than a million, it

was reckoned that three hundred thousand had perished during the conflict

with the Turk. The whole fabric of political and social order had to be

erected anew; and, difficult as this task would have been for the wisest

ruler, it was rendered much more difficult by the conflict between

Capodistrias' own ideal and the character of the people among whom he had

to work. Communal or local self-government lay at the very root of Greek

nationality. In many different forms this intense provincialism had

maintained itself unimpaired up to the end of the war, in spite of national

assemblies and national armaments. The Hydriote ship-owners, the Primates

of the Morea, the guerilla leaders of the north, had each a type of life

and a body of institutions as distinct as the dialects which they spoke or

the saints whom they cherished in their local sanctuaries. If antagonistic

in some respects to national unity, this vigorous local life had

nevertheless been a source of national energy while Greece had still its

independence to win; and now that national independence was won, it might

well have been made the basis of a popular and effective system of

self-government. But to Capodistrias, as to greater men of that age, the

unity of the State meant the uniformity of all its parts; and, shutting his

eyes to all the obstacles in his path, he set himself to create an

administrative system as rigorously centralised as that which France had

received from Napoleon. Conscious of his own intellectual superiority over

his countrymen, conscious of his own integrity and of the sacrifice of all

his personal wealth in his country's service, he put no measure on his

expressions of scorn for the freebooters and peculators whom he believed to

make up the Greek official world, and he both acted and spoke as if, in the

literal sense of the words, all who ever came before him were thieves and

robbers. The peasants of the mainland, who had suffered scarcely less from

Klephts and Primates than from Turks, welcomed Capodistrias' levelling

despotism, and to the end his name was popular among them; but among the

classes which had supplied the leaders in the long struggle for

independence, and especially among the ship-owners of the Archipelago, who

felt the contempt expressed by Capodistrias for their seven years' efforts

to be grossly unjust, a spirit of opposition arose which soon made it

evident that Capodistrias would need better instruments than those which he

had around him to carry out his task of remodelling Greece.

[Leopold renounces the crown, May, 1830.]

It was in the midst of this growing antagonism that the news reached

Capodistrias that Leopold of Saxe-Coburg had been appointed King of Greece.

The resolution made by the Powers in March, 1829, that the sovereign of

Greece should belong to some reigning house, had perhaps not wholly

destroyed the hopes of Capodistrias that he might become Prince or Hospodar

of Greece himself. There were difficulties in the way of filling the

throne, and these difficulties, after the appointment of Leopold,

Capodistrias certainly did not seek to lessen. His subtlety, his command of

the indirect methods of effecting a purpose, were so great and so habitual

to him that there was little chance of his taking any overt step for

preventing Leopold's accession to the crown; there appears, however, to be

evidence that he repressed the indications of assent which the Greeks

attempted to offer to Leopold; and a series of letters written by him to

that prince was probably intended, though in the most guarded language, to

give Leopold the impression that the task which awaited him was a hopeless

one. Leopold himself, at the very time when he accepted the crown, was

wavering in his purpose. He saw with perfect clearness that the territory

granted to the Greek State was too small to secure either its peace or its

independence. The severance of Acarnania and Northern Ætolia meant the

abandonment of the most energetic part of the Greek inland population, and

a probable state of incessant warfare upon the northern frontier; the

relinquishment of Crete meant that Greece, bankrupt as it was, must

maintain a navy to protect the south coast of the Morea from Turkish

attack. These considerations had been urged upon the Powers by Leopold

before he accepted the crown, and he had been induced for the moment to

withdraw them. But he had never fully acquiesced in the arrangements

imposed upon him: he remained irresolute for some months; and at last,

whether led to this decision by the letters of Capodistrias or by some

other influences, he declared the conditions under which he was called upon

to rule Greece to be intolerable, and renounced the crown (May, 1830).

[384]

[Government and death of Capodistrias.]

Capodistrias thus found himself delivered from his rival, and again face to

face with the task to which duty or ambition called him. The candidature of

Leopold had embittered the relations between Capodistrias and all who

confronted him in Greece, for it gave him the means of measuring their

hostility to himself by the fervour of their addresses to this unknown

foreigner. A dark shadow fell over his government. As difficulties

thickened and resistance grew everywhere more determined, the President

showed himself harsher and less scrupulous in the choice of his means. The

men about him were untrustworthy; to crush them, he filled the offices of

government with relatives and creatures of his own who were at once

tyrannous and incapable. Thwarted and checked, he met opposition by

imprisonment and measures of violence, suspended the law-courts, and

introduced the espionage and the police-system of St. Petersburg. At length

armed rebellion broke out, and while Miaoulis, the Hydriote admiral, blew

up the best ships of the Greek navy to prevent them falling into the

President's hands, the wild district of Maina, which had never admitted the

Turkish tax-gatherer, refused to pay taxes to the Hellenic State. The

revolt was summarily quelled by Capodistrias, and several members of the

family of Mauromichalis, including the chief Petrobei, formerly feudal

ruler of Maina, were arrested. Some personal insult, imaginary or real, was

moreover offered by Capodistrias to this fallen foe, after the aged mother

of Petrobei, who had lost sixty-four kinsmen in the war against the Turks,

had begged for his release. The vendetta of the Maina was aroused. A son

and a nephew of Petrobei laid wait for the President, and as he entered the

Church of St. Spiridion at Nauplia on the 9th of October, 1831, a

pistol-shot and a blow from a yataghan laid him dead on the ground. He had

been warned that his life was sought, but had refused to make any change in

his habits, or to allow himself to be attended by a guard.

[Otho King of Greece, Feb. 1, 1833.]

The death of Capodistrias excited sympathies and regrets which to a great

extent silenced criticism upon his government, and which have made his name

one of those most honoured by the Greek nation. His fall threw the country

into anarchy. An attempt was made by his brother Augustine to retain

autocratic power, but the result was universal dissension and the

interference of the foreigner. At length the Powers united in finding a

second sovereign for Greece, and brought the weary scene of disorder to a

close. Prince Otho of Bavaria was sent to reign at Athens, and with him

there came a group of Bavarian officials to whom the Courts of Europe

persuaded themselves that the future of Greece might be safely entrusted. A

frontier somewhat better than that which had been offered to Leopold was

granted to the new sovereign, but neither Crete, Thessaly, nor Epirus was

included within his kingdom. Thus hemmed in within intolerably narrow

limits, while burdened with the expenses of an independent state, alike

unable to meet the calls upon its national exchequer and to exclude the

intrigues of foreign Courts, Greece offered during the next generation

little that justified the hopes that had been raised as to its future. But

the belief of mankind in the invigorating power of national independence is

not wholly vain, nor, even under the most hostile conditions, will the

efforts of a liberated people fail to attract the hope and the envy of

those branches of its race which still remain in subjection. Poor and

inglorious as the Greek kingdom was, it excited the restless longings not

only of Greeks under Turkish bondage, but of the prosperous Ionian Islands

under English rule; and in 1864 the first step in the expansion of the

Hellenic kingdom was accomplished by the transfer of these islands from

Great Britain to Greece. Our own day has seen Greece further strengthened

and enriched by the annexation of Thessaly. The commercial and educational

development of the kingdom is now as vigorous as that of any State in

Europe: in agriculture and in manufacturing industry it still lingers far

behind. Following the example of Cavour and the Sardinian statesmen who

judged no cost too great in preparing for Italian union, the rulers of

Greece burden the national finances with the support of an army and navy

excessive in comparison both with the resources and with the present

requirements of the State. To the ideal of a great political future the

material progress of the land has been largely sacrificed. Whether, in the

re-adjustment of frontiers which must follow upon the gradual extrusion of

the Turk from Eastern Europe, Greece will gain from its expenditure

advantages proportionate to the undoubted evils which it has involved, the

future alone can decide.