the train laid to the mine Lord Palmerston was about to spring. He tried
in vain to persuade the Greek ministers to make such concessions as
would prevent an open rupture. His conciliatory conduct misled the Greek
court into a belief that Lord Palmerston was afraid to come to blows,
and, in an evil hour, it deemed itself secure of victory. The only
alternative left to Great Britain, in King Otho’s opinion, was to
withdraw the English minister from Athens. But, even if Lord
Palmerston’s disposition had made him inclined to take this course, King
Otho ought to have remembered that the convention of 1832, which created
the Greek kingdom, bound England to watch over it. So infatuated was the
court of Athens at this time, that the modifications which it would be
possible to make in the Greek constitution, after the departure of the
English minister, became a subject of conversation. Yet when the hour
arrived, and Lord Palmerston’s demands were communicated, the Greek
ministers felt the folly of resistance; and they would have capitulated,
had the minister of the French Republic not availed himself of the
conjuncture to flatter King Otho’s private prejudices, and assumed the
direction of affairs. The Greek minister of foreign affairs, Mr Londos,
was a man utterly unfit for the place. His communications to the
Chambers, on the subject of the quarrel, are a tissue of erroneous
statements. M. Thouvenel persuaded this unlucky minister to brave Lord
Palmerston, and trust to the protection of France and the European
press. The French minister knew that he would gain for himself the star
and the broad blue ribbon of King Otho’s Order of the Redeemer, and he
knew equally well that he would inflict a serious injury on the commerce
and revenues of Greece, and that he would cause the ruin of many Greek
merchants. There can be no doubt, that ambassadors ought never to be
allowed to receive Orders from the sovereigns to whose court they are
accredited. The interests of nations are often sacrificed by honourable
men for stars and ribbons. In finally coming to an open rupture with
Greece, Lord Palmerston probably only did what any other minister who
had placed himself in a similar position must have done. But though we
believe that it was King Otho who made the cup run over, we have shown
our readers that Lord Palmerston had already filled it pretty full; and
we are far from approving of the measures he adopted for the coercion of
the Greek Government. In our opinion, it was cruel to punish the Greek
people for the faults of their rulers, since those rulers were selected
and protected by the Three Powers, of which England is one. The coercion
ought to have been confined to measures that would have directly
affected the King and the Government.
We have now laid before our readers the history of all the causes,
supposed and real, of Lord Palmerston’s war with Greece. It was neither
the livery waistcoat of Sir E. Lyon’s groom, the missing chair at the
royal comedy, Mr Pacifico’s furniture, Mr Finlay’s garden, no, nor the
constitutional policy of the English Government, that brought our fleet
to Salamis. It was the anonymous correspondent of the _Morning
Chronicle_ in 1839, be that individual who he may. Lord Palmerston’s
conduct to Greece since that period, it is true, has been generally
unwise, and often unjust; but that correspondence having been once
placed to the account of the British Cabinet by the King of Greece, he
consequently acted in such a spirit towards England, that we acknowledge
a collision became unavoidable, without a sacrifice of the dignity of
the British Crown. The papers laid before Parliament show, that the
communications of the English Government were left unanswered for years.
We are bound also to observe, that the conduct of King Otho has so
completely disorganised the finances of Greece, that his throne is in
imminent danger, and a great change in the government of Greece must
take place in the present year. In the year 1848, a serious rebellion
took place in Greece. The diplomacy of England was accused of
encouraging the insurgents, and, for some days, the flight of King Otho
from Athens was an event hourly expected. When the full extent of the
evil, and the anarchy which threatened the country in consequence of the
insane conduct of the Greek Opposition, was known in England, Lord
Palmerston frankly changed his policy, and sent our ablest and best
English diplomatist, Sir Stratford Canning, to save King Otho’s throne.
If a throne be of any value, the King of Greece owed some thanks to
England for the great services of Sir Stratford Canning, who had to
encounter a virulent and unfair opposition from the English officials at
Athens during his exertions to save Greece from anarchy.
We have no time to point out the connexion of the events we have noticed
with the general movement of European diplomacy since 1833. Our space
compels us to confine our observations to Greece; and we must now
hastily examine the state of society in the country, in order to enable
our readers to judge of the manner in which the civilisation of the
people affects the administration of public affairs. The Greeks
themselves think that their great political want is a good systematic
central administration. We believe, on the contrary, that their great
political deficiency is the want of municipal institutions, that would
admit of their making some exertions to improve their own condition.
Every one who has travelled much in Greece must have seen, that every
little town and island contains two or three individuals capable of
fulfilling the duties of a local magistracy with honour to their
country; while everybody who has had anything to do with the ministers
of King Otho, or with the members of his council of state, knows that
there is not a statesman in Greece capable of filling a ministerial
post, in a period of political difficulty, without disgracing his
country. It would be invidious to name respectable men as instances of
incapacity; but every one, who has followed the political history of
Greece, is aware that every Greek statesman has had opportunities of
disgracing it, and repeating the same blunders several times. The
despotic government of King Otho failed from the utter incapacity of his
ministers; the constitutional monarchy is hastening to ruin from the
same cause. In the present state of Greece, it is not possible to find
men capable of conducting the King’s Government with the necessary
ability. The people are greatly in advance of their rulers.
The conclusion of the revolutionary war left the nation divided into
several classes of society, as different in their ideas and habits of
life as if they had formed parts of different nations. These classes
were, first, the peasantry—for so the cultivators of the soil are
generally called, though a large portion of them are landed proprietors,
and often the only persons of substance in the provinces. Second, the
primates, or proprietors, who did not cultivate their own lands. These
men managed public business, and acted as collectors of the revenue
under the Turks: they frequent coffee-houses, and form political
societies under the centralised constitutional system of government.
This class, however, possesses some education, but its moral character
is vitiated by a firm conviction that it is entitled to be maintained in
a state of idleness at the public expense. It has gained considerable
political influence by means of the election law of 1844. Coletti, by
intimidating the weak, bribing the active, and creating innumerable
places, purchased this class wholesale, and rendered himself master of
nearly all the electoral districts in Greece. The third class is
composed of that numerous body of Greeks who have emigrated to the
Hellenic territory from different provinces of Turkey. This class
includes the greater part of the ablest and best educated men in the
country; but the abject principles of the Phanariotes, or Greeks
educated for the public service in Turkey, and the base avidity
displayed by this class in place-hunting, which is their principal means
of life, rendered them very unpopular, and enabled their rivals, the
primates, to exclude them from official employments by a decree of the
national assembly of 1844. The fourth class is the military. This class
is very numerous, as its ranks are swelled by crowds of individuals who
never served in a military capacity, but who have received military rank
as a payment for political services. King Otho makes generals of
secretaries, and colonels of commissaries; while farmers of the revenue,
muleteers, and officers’ servants, form about one half of the unattached
officers of an army which counts an officer for every two privates and a
quarter, if we can trust the Greek Budget and the Greek newspapers.
There is also a remarkable difference between the social condition of
the inhabitants of the country and of the towns; and this difference
must be taken into consideration in estimating the political state of
Greece. The principal towns contain as many persons of education, and as
high a degree of mental cultivation, as can be found in any towns of a
similar size in other countries; but in the rural districts, on the
contrary, there is a want of material civilisation, a degree of rudeness
in every process of industry, which places the agricultural population
far below the people of every other European country, even including the
Greek population in Turkey. The Hellenic peasant cultivates his
_zevgari_, or yoke of land, in a manner that only enables him to live,
to rear a family to replace his own, and to pay his taxes. No
improvements take place on his farm—nor, indeed, can any take place
under the system of taxation and administration actually in force. Fruit
trees are annually destroyed, and forests are burnt down, but none are
ever planted. The depopulation caused by the war of the revolution may
still admit of the location of some additional families on uncultivated
land; but no improvement has yet been commenced in agricultural industry
or transport, that will give one family the means or the time to
cultivate more land than its predecessors have cultivated, or that will
make the same extent of land to yield any additional produce.
Here, then, we find precisely the state of things which produced the
stationary condition of European society during the middle ages, and
which still keeps the greater part of the East in its immutable
condition. The land under the windows of King Otho’s palace, and the
fields around the university of Athens, are more rudely cultivated than
any other portion of the soil of Europe; yet neither king, senators,
deputies, nor professors, appear to have perceived that the turning
point of national civilisation is not marked by the splendour of court
balls, the regularity of the payment of official salaries, or the number
and quality of scholastic lectures, but by the creation of a state of
things in which capital is advantageously employed in augmenting the
produce of the soil. When this is not the case, generations of
agriculturists succeed one another for ages, treading in the footsteps
of their predecessors in the same numbers, and in the same state of
barbarism.
Coexistent with this rude peasantry, there is an educated class whose
numbers are also limited by the fixed amount of rent and taxes, on which
they depend for their support, and by means of which they perpetuate
themselves by the side of the rude agriculturists, giving the towns all
the appearance of civilisation. This unfortunate state of society is not
new in the history of the Greek nation: it has now existed for more than
1000 years, and it forms the prominent feature in the internal
organisation of the Byzantine empire. Judging from the records of that
government, it is a state of society that presents greater obstacles to
change than any social combinations which the history of the human race
reveals to the west of China. The cultivators of the soil cannot improve
their condition or increase in number; the educated classes are
interested in opposing change, and have influence enough to prevent it:
poverty in the country, and meanness in the towns, render the universal
moral degradation an element of stability in the political condition of
a nation whose social state is such as we have described.
There remains an important class of society in Greece, which we have not
yet mentioned, because it has been excluded from all political influence
since the formation of the Hellenic monarchy. This is the mercantile
class. Before the revolutionary war, and during the contest with the
Turks, it was the Greek merchants and shipowners who formed the
aristocracy of the nation; but this class is now almost null in the
movement of political affairs at Athens. The greater part of the able,
respectable, and wealthy merchants have quitted the country, and are to
be found at Odessa, Trieste, Marseilles, London, and Manchester, not in
King Otho’s dominions. A small fraction of shipowners remain, but the
small schooners that now compose the mercantile navy of Greece cannot be
compared with the fine ships that Hydra, Spetzia, and Psara formerly
sent out to engage the Turkish fleet; and the comparative increase of
the tonnage of the trading vessels of large size in Greece and Turkey,
since 1840, shows that the trade of the Levant is extending more rapidly
under the Turkish than under the Greek flag.
We have now described the state of society with sufficient accuracy to
enable us to examine the value of the measures adopted for founding a
monarchy in Greece. From what we have said, it must be evident that
constitutional government, as the Continental liberals and English
political lecturers understand the term, could not be an object of much
interest to those classes that were called upon to exercise universal
suffrage. It probably never engaged their attention more seriously than
the laws of gravitation or the number of the fixed stars. They felt that
they wanted permanent and systematic administration, in place of the
inconstant and arbitrary measures from which they suffered; they
demanded security of property, liquidation of the public debt, and
employment for labour, but they knew not how to arrive at the
consummation of their wishes. Instead of attending to these commonplace
matters, the British Government and its allies gave the Greeks a king, a
court, a regency less united than their own Capitani, civil wars,
additional debts, and an order of knighthood to corrupt foreign
diplomatists; but not a road, a bridge, or a ferry-boat, was introduced
into a country full of mountains and dangerous torrent-beds, and
consisting, in great part, of peninsulas and islands. King Otho, who has
spent £3,000,000 sterling on civil wars, and £1,000,000 on palaces, does
not possess fifty miles of road practicable for a donkey-cart, in his
whole dominions. There is not a carriage-road from Athens to Corinth,
nor a ferry-boat to the islands of the Archipelago. Need we wonder,
then, if the Greeks despise their own Government, and suspect the
intentions of the three protecting powers that support it in its evil
conduct? The consequence is, that fifteen thousand military and police
officials fail to preserve order in a population of nine hundred and
twenty thousand souls. The result of this political experiment, in the
foundation of monarchies, certainly reflects little credit on the
statesmen of England, France, and Russia.
We must examine the error that was committed, in giving the countenance
of Great Britain, as a protecting power, to the absurd constitution
established in 1844; and while we blame what was then badly done, we
shall point out what common sense, when not warped by party interests,
dictated ought to have been done. Of course, we can only offer the
suggestions urged by a wise minority at Athens. The nation, in making
the revolution in 1843, did not want a constitution, for they possessed
institutions which a written constitution is only valuable as a means of
attaining. The Greeks, as we have said before, sought to reform the
system of administration. The method of carrying on the executive
government, under the hourly control of an elective chamber, called
constitutional government, was forced upon them by accident, as France
lately became a republic. Without the assistance of this _pons asinorum_
of French politicians, the Greeks had saved the liberty of the press
from the attacks of Count Armansperg, and established trial by jury in
spite of Austria and Russia.
The constitutional system of government, as it has laid hold of the
public mind on the Continent, is a very imperfect political contrivance:
practically, it has proved a delusion—a mere form, figured in empty
space by a mass of thick clouds, impelled hither and thither by unseen
currents of wind, the precursor of an approaching storm, not the source
of beneficial showers. When examined in detail, with its tribunes; its
orators, pamphlet in hand; its galleries, and its ministers playing at
see-saw between social democracy and court corruption, what hope does it
hold out of establishing a sense of moral responsibility and firmness of
purpose in individual statesmen, or the deep conviction that creates
patriotic feeling, and the power of self-sacrifice, in a whole people?
What collection of men, chosen by a mob which can never hear the names
of the wisest and best in their immediate vicinity, can, in the actual
state of education, morality, and religion, either possess the
qualifications necessary to make laws, or the experience required to
control and direct the executive government? English institutions, or
what we call, in conversation, the English constitution, is even now
something totally different from this spawn of modern political
quackery. Yet even among men of education, at home as well as among
demagogues and itinerant orators, we now find some who pretend that our
political system would be improved by allowing Gregory the poacher, and
Herman the tinker, to take an active share in legislation, by the
adoption of universal suffrage, annual Parliaments, and the vote by
ballot. We doubt whether a British _Codex Gregorianus_ or
_Hermogenianus_, so framed, would do our country much honour. Things are
bad enough as they are. We already make laws faster than lawyers can
read them; and the electors care very little about the legislative
labours of the elected. They seem contented to know that the work has
been done in such a hurry, that half of it must be done over again next
year. The people of England, like the Continental constitutionalists,
are beginning to fancy that the proper function of our legislators is to
make themselves the real executive. A true constitutional chamber,
according to the modern theory of government, ought to use the king’s
ministers as its own head-clerks. The evil is manifest. Ministers know
that their masters, the chambers, have no administrative plans, and a
very defective memory, so they themselves remain without any settled
policy. This state of things is a vice of our age. It is as apparent in
the embryo constitutionalism of Greece, as in the premature decrepitude
of Liberalism in France.
Constitutional government, where no educated and independent class
exists in the provinces, must always turn out, as it has done in Greece,
to be injurious to the cause of liberty, unless it be neutralised by
powerful municipal institutions, and an able and disinterested monarch.
The prominent vices of the Greek constitution are, universal suffrage,
vote by ballot, and a servile, ignorant, and useless Senate, as a satire
on a House of Peers. Without entering into any general examination of
the value of similar measures in other countries, we shall show that
they are unsuited to the actual state of society in Greece. Universal
suffrage evidently supposes that the people intrusted with it is
entitled to self-government; yet the constitution of Greece, which gives
the people universal suffrage, does not allow them any practical
influence even in the affairs of their smallest towns and rural
districts. Every person in Greece is supposed to be capable of choosing
legislators, but not mayors, aldermen, and provincial councillors. The
Greeks possessed great power in the local administration under the
Turks. This power contributed in a high degree to the preservation of
their national existence, but it alarmed the weak-minded Bavarians; and,
under the shield of the three protecting powers, the Greeks were robbed
of their municipal institutions by the Regency. A system of local
oligarchies was introduced, which prevails at present.
The election of the mayor and aldermen is vested in an electoral
college, one half of which is composed of the persons who pay the
greatest amount of taxes. Here is an element of respectability; but in
order to dilute it with one of servility, a certain number of
individuals, decorated with crosses, is admitted. Even this respectably
servile body is not allowed to elect the mayor; it is only empowered to
name three candidates, from which the King chooses the individual who is
to direct the interests of the little community. The mayor so chosen
enjoys his office for three years, and receives a good salary from the
municipal funds. Let us now examine how this system is worked, in
conformity with constitutional principles, in the capital of the
Hellenic kingdom. Attica, it must be observed, sends four deputies to
the Legislative Chamber; and as these deputies receive two hundred and
fifty drachmas a-month, and have succeeded in making the sittings of the
Greek Chambers perpetual, the place of deputy is worth as much as the
best estates in Greece. Now, as these interminable sitters are chosen by
universal suffrage, but are required to support the minister, it became
absolutely necessary to job the elections, by means of the oligarchy
holding office in the municipalities. This was not very difficult, for
the number of persons who can read and write among the Albanian
population of Attica, which outnumbers the Greek, is very small. Even
among the Greek population of the city of Athens, the proportion of
government officials and street porters, who pay no taxes, exceeds the
number of the independent citizens. The middle classes, and the friends
of order, are excluded from all local influence, by being excluded from
any share in the municipal government. A town-council party is formed,
and this party is allowed to employ the whole local revenues of Attica,
amounting to between three and four hundred thousand drachmas annually,
in jobbing, on condition that they support the ministerial candidates at
the elections.
The constitutional system of political corruption, to make universal
suffrage profitable to the court, runs thus: The mayors are selected
from men without character or local influence. This is brought about by
naming the third candidate mayor, he being generally some insignificant
person, whom both the leading parties agree to admit on the list. This
individual, when appointed, is nothing more than a creature of the
prefect or of the court, which alone possesses the power of protecting
him in office, and in the receipt of a good salary for three years. The
duty of the mayor is to bribe the aldermen, by allowing them to arrange
with the municipal councillors how to divert the revenues of the city
into their own pockets, or that of their relations, by the creation of
places. The extent to which the court have brought jobbing, is testified
by the shifts and tergiversation employed to prevent the publication of
any regular accounts of the receipts and expenditure of the
municipalities; and the municipal revenues exceed the sum of two
millions of drachmas. Athens, with a revenue of three hundred thousand
drachmas a-year, would be the filthiest town in Europe, were nature not
kinder to it than its magistrates.
A single instance of how matters are carried on in the provinces, is
sufficient to describe the whole system. A rural commune, placed on an
important line of communication, wished to make a good mule road over a
mountain pass. It voted the sum of six hundred drachmas in its budget,
hoping, by its example, to produce similar votes in the neighbouring
communes. The central government was then invited to send an engineer,
to trace the best line of road. The deputy of the province was a
creature of the court; he and the minister of the interior put their
heads together, and sent down an inspector of the road, before it was
surveyed or commenced, with an order on the commune which had put six
hundred drachmas in its budget, to pay him a salary of fifty drachmas
monthly for a year. This ministerial exploit put an end to all projects
of road-making on the part of the municipalities.