which the Russian Nesselrodes and Pozzo di Borgos excel. But more. Might not the Turk, who is by no means a milksop, and who can deal heavy blows, as we have just seen, even from his sick-bed-might not the Turk oppose the armed intervention of the Powers, and might not some untoward collision be the result, and might not the Turkish navy be annihilated; and then-O! then, might not the way to Constantinople be more open, and the Balkan more easily crossed? Such were the cogitations that might naturally begin to move in the brain of a thoroughly Russian energetic and enterprising young Czar, when the proposal was made to coerce the Sultan into the recognition of the total or partial independence of one of his revolted provinces. And the result, as we all know, was exactly such as the most brilliant imagination of a brisk young emperor could have conceived. In the course of a few months the Turkish fleet was destroyed at Navarino; in two years Kustendji and Varna, and the whole sea-road to Stamboul, were in the hands of the Russian fleet; and in three years General Diebitch had made himself immortal by surmounting the unsurmountable Balkan, and was resting with twenty thousand men (supposed, however, to be sixty thousand!) on the banks of the Hebrus at Adrianople. Never was game better played. The Turko-Russian campaign of 1828-9, which we can now study to such advantage, was, we may say, impossible, but for the battle of Navarino, which was only the natural result of the armed intervention of the three Powers in favour of Greece. Add to this the disorganisation of the Turkish army, caused by the massacre of the Janizaries in 1826, and the consequent disaffection among the old Turkish conservatives; and we shall see at once how the campaign of 1828-9 ended so gloriously for Russia, while that of 1854 has proved so shameful. The cause of the difference lies obviously in the command of the Black Sea, which Russia, by the disaster of Navarino, then had, and which, by the AngloFrench alliance, she now has not. This, and this only, has on the present occasion made the gallant defence

of a single fortress by the Turks equivalent to the loss of a whole campaign by the Russians.

The last of our five points only remains-How has the establishment of Greek independence, by the treaty of 1827, answered the expectations of its founders?- What is the actual state of Greece, material, moral, and intellectual?-Are the Greeks under German Otho substantially more prosperous than they were under the Turkish Mahmouds? We cannot, of course, hope to answer these questions satisfactorily within the limits at present prescribed to us; but one or two observations we are compelled to make, for the sake of taming down to somewhat of a more sober temper the glowing observations with which Sir Archibald Alison concludes his fourteenth chapter. There is a class of wise men in the world who show their wisdom only in the negative way of seeing difficulties and making objections. Sir Archibald Alison certainly does not belong to this class. Once possessed by a grand idea, he marches on fearlessly to its realisation, and lets difficulties shift for themselves. He gives you a project for a marble palace and a granite bridge; but seems to forget sometimes that there are only bricks to build with. We like this error, which leans to virtue's side, and has a savour of something positive and productive; nevertheless the truth must be spoken-for in politics the best intentions are often the mother of the greatest blunders. The remarks of Sir Archibald Alison, which we think require a little chastening, are as follows:

6th July 1827 having been an unjustifi"In truth, so far from the treaty of able interference with the rights of the Ottoman Government as an independent power, it was just the reverse; and the only thing to be regretted is that the Christian powers did not interfere earlier in the contest, and with far more extensive views for the restoration of the Greek empire. After the massacre of Chios, the Turks had thrown themselves out of the pale of civilisation: they had proved human race, and no longer entitled_to themselves to be pirates, enemies of the toleration from the European family. Expulsion from Europe was the natural and legitimate consequence of their flagrant violation of its usages in war.

Had this

been done in 1822-had the Congress of Verona acceded to the prayers of the Greeks, and restored the Christian empire of the East under the guarantee of the Allied Powers-what an ocean of blood would have been dried up, what boundless misery prevented, what prospects of felicity to the human race opened! A Christian monarchy of ten millions of souls, with Constantinople for its capital, would, ere this, have added a half to its population, wealth, and all the elements of national strength. The rapid growth, since the Crescent was expelled from their territories, of Servia, Greece, the Isles of the Archipelago, Wallachia, and Moldavia, and of the Christian inhabitants in all parts of the country, proves what might have been expected had all Turkey in Europe been blessed by a similar liberation. The fairest portion of Europe would have been restored to the rule of religion, liberty, and civilisation, and a barrier erected by European freedom against Asiatic despotism in the regions where it was first successfully combated.

"What is the grand difficulty that now surrounds the Eastern question, which has rendered it all but insoluble even to the most far-seeing statesman, and has compelled the Western Powers, for their own sake, to ally themselves with a state which they would all gladly, were it practicable without general danger, see expelled from Europe? Is it not that the Ottoman empire is the only barrier which exists against the encroachments of Russia, and that if it is destroyed the independence of every European state is endangered by the extension of the Muscovite power from the Baltic to the Mediterranean? All see the necessity of this barrier, yet all are sensible of its weakness, and feel that it is one which is daily becoming more feeble, and must in the progress of time be swept away. This difficulty is entirely of our own creation; it might have been obviated, and a firm bulwark erected in the East, against which all the surges of Muscovite ambition would have beat in vain. Had the dictates of humanity, justice, and policy been listened to in 1822, and a Christian monarchy been erected in European Turkey, under the guarantee of Austria, France, and England, the whole difficulties of the Eastern Question would have been obviated, and European independence would have found an additional security in the very quarter where it is now most seriously menaced. Instead of the living being allied to the dead, they would have been linked to the living; and a barrier against Eastern conquest erected on the shores of the Hellespont, not with

the worn-out materials of Maliommedan despotism, but with the rising energy of Christian civilisation.

"But modern Turkey, it is said, is divided by race, religion, and situation; three-fourths of it are Christian, onefourth Mahommedan: there are six millions of Sclavonians, four millions of Bulgarians, two millions and a half of Turks, and only one million of Greeks;-how can a united and powerful empire be formed of such materials Most true; and in what state was Greece anterior to the Persian invasion; Italy before the Punic wars; England during the Heptarchy; Spain in the time of the Moors; France during its civil wars? Has the existence of such apparently fatal elements of division prevented these countries from becoming the most renowned, the most powerful, the most prosperous communities upon earth? In truth, diver sity of race, so far from being an element of weakness, is, when duly coerced, the most prolific source of strength; it is to the body politic what the intermix. ture of soils is to the richness of the earth. It is the meagreness of unmingled race which is the real source of weakness; for it leaves hereditary maladies unchanged, hereditary defects unsupplied. Witness the unchanging ferocity in every age of the Ishmaelite, the irremediable indolence of the Irish, the incurable arrogance of the Turk; while the mingled blood of the Briton, the Roman, the Saxon, the Dane, and the Norman, has produced the race to which is destined the sceptre of half the globe,

"Such was the resurrection of Greece; thus did old Hellas rise from the grave of nations. Scorched by fire, riddled by shot, baptised in blood, she emerged victorious from the contest; she achieved her independence because she proved herself worthy of it; she was trained to manhood in the only school of real improvement, the school of suffering. Twenty-five years have elapsed since her independence was sealed by the battle of Navarino, and already the warmest hopes of her friends have been realised. Her capital, Athens, now contains thirty thousand inhabitants, quadruple what it did when the contest terminated; its commerce has doubled, and all the signs of rapidly advancing prosperity are to be seen on the land. The inhabitants have increased fifty per cent; they are now above seven hundred thousand, but the fatal chasms produced by the war, especially in the male population, are still in a great measure unsupplied, and vast tracts of fertile land, spread with the bones of its defenders,

await in every part of the country the robust arm of industry for their cultiva tion. The Greeks, indeed, have not all the virtues of freemen; perhaps they are never destined to exhibit them. Like the Muscovites, and from the same cause,

they are often cunning, fraudulent, deceitful; slaves always are such; and a nation is not crushed by a thousand years of Byzantine despotism, and four hundred of Mahommedan oppression, without having some of the features of the servile character impressed upon it. But they exhibit also the cheering symptoms of social improvement; they have proved they still possess the qualities to which their ancestors' greatness was owing. They are lively, ardent, and persevering, passionately desirous of knowledge, and indefatigable in the pursuit of it. The whole life which yet animates the Ottoman Empire is owing to their intelligence and activity. The stagnation of despotism is unknown among them; if the union of civilisation is unhappily equally unknown, that is a virtue of the manhood, and not to be looked for in the infancy of nations. The consciousness of deficiencies is the first step to their removal; the pride of bar

barism, the self-sufficiency of ignorance, is the real bar to improvement; and a nation which is capable of making the efforts for improvement which the Greeks are doing, if not in possession of political greatness, is on the road to it."

Now, to the first proposition contained in the above remarks, that the Great Powers were perfectly justified in their intervention to save the Greeks from the lawless ferocity of the Turks, we have no objections to offer. It is a gladdening thing to believe and to see that the strong cry of human sympathy will sometimes be listened to even by politicians, and that heartless diplomacy in the public intercourse between people and people is not all in all. But the summary expulsion of the Turks from European Turkey, even supposing it were not too great a punishment for the offence, would, when achieved, leave the most difficult part of the Greek problem unsolved. Sir Archibald assumes that the discordant and crude elements of which European Turkey, less the Turks, is composed, would, in 1827, have readily coalesced, or is ready now, in 1854, to coalesce, into a great Greek empire, of which Constantinople shall be the capital. That the Greeks themselves should

believe this is natural; that Sir Archibald Alison should believe it, carried away by a noble sympathy with a heroic theme, is but the radiation of that fire with which the noblest minds

burn most intensely; but we have

never conversed with an individual practically conversant with the elements of which Christian Turkey is composed, who looked upon such a consummation, in the present age at least, as possible. A very intelligent and patriotic Greek gentleman once remarked in our hearing, that the Greek kingdom could never prosper in its present tiny dimensions; that the Greek Islands-except Corcyra, which the English must keep as a naval station-with Thessaly, and part of Thrace and Macedonia, must be added to it before it could be free from that spirit of petty intrigue which is the great vice of small governments. This is intelligible; because the population included under such an extended Greek kingdom would, by a great predominance both of numbers and moral forces, be essentially Greek. But when it is proposed seriously to revive a Byzantine empire, Greek merely in name, and comprising such large sections of a non-Hellenic population as Servia, for instance, and Bulgaria, then, we confess, we feel staggered; and all the historic analogies which Sir Archibald Alison so skilfully presses into his service will not give wings to our drooping faith. The best-instructed man with whom we ever conversed on the subject-Dr George Finlay, who has lived among the Greeks all his lifedeclares that such a combination is impossible: the principle of cohesion is too weak, that of repulsion too strong: the splendid aggregate would fall to pieces in a few years; and out of the confused elements a new compulsory crystallisation take place under the influence- very likely-of Russian polarity. Sir Archibald Alison himself, in one of the phrases which he accidentally drops, seems to admit the truth of this view. "Diversity of race," he says, "so far from being an element of weakness, is, when duly coerced, the most prolific source of strength." Very true, when duly coerced; but it is this very principle of coercion that would not exist in the supposed Byzantine empire; and

could exist only, according to one of Sir A. Alison's own analogies, through the violent subjection of all the other, races by the one that happened to be strongest; for so it was, as Livy shows in bloody detail, that the different races of Italy were coerced into a grand national unity by the Roman Latins. But even after all that bloody cementing, the aggregate of the Italian States, as no one knows better than Sir Archibald Alison, was kept together by the loosest possible cohesion; as the terrible outburst of the Marsic or Social war testifies, which wellnigh split Italy into two, at a time when Julius Cæsar, its future master, had not yet begun to trim his beard. He certainly, the lion, and his nephew Augustus, the fox after him, did use the bloody cement successfully, and exercised a strong coercion, the effect of which is visible even now among the again-divided possessors of the Italian soil; such a coercion as the present Czar of Russia might perhaps at the present moment be in the fair way of exercising for the sake of the Orthodox Church, had Sir Archibald Alison's Byzantine empire been patched together with a few purple rags in the year 1828. Or again, to take another of his analogies, has Sir Archibald Alison forgotten what was the state of Greece, not anterior to, but immediately after the Persian invasion ?-did it not plunge at once into all the pettiness of provincial rivalry? and was not the great Peloponnesian war a speaking proof, that there were no elements of cohesion even among pure Greeks, and in the best days of Greece, strong enough to keep that unfortunate country from consuming its own vitals in civil war, and becoming, by voluntary self-betrayal, first the scoff of the Persian, and then the prey of the Macedonian? With these examples before us, we cannot but consider ourselves more near the truth in following the practical statesmen who declared that the new Greek kingdom should be confined within the limits where the insurrection had chiefly raged, and where the battle had been fought. Sober politicians could not but look upon the whole affair as experimental; and whatever arguments may in the course of events be advanced for an expan

sion of the limits of the existing monarchy, no person practically acquainted with the events of Greek government, or rather misgovernment, since the creation of Otho's kingdom in 1832, can imagine that the evils under which the country has groaned would have been less, had Thessaly and Macedonia been at that time included within the Hellenic border. We should still have had German bureaucracy, French constitutionalism, Fanariete intrigue, Etolian brigandage, and modern diplomacy, thrown together to brew a devil's soup of jobbery, and falsehood, and feebleness, over which the wisest man can only hold up his hands, and with a hopeless wonderment exclaim

"Double, double, toil and trouble;

Fire burn, and cauldron bubble!"

In conclusion, we need hardly say that we cannot agree with Sir A. Alison when he states, so strongly as he does in the last paragraph, that already the warmest hopes of the friends of Greece have been realised; and all the signs of advancing prosperity are to be seen in the land." It is a great mistake to imagine that the country is really in a prosperous state because Athens has trebled its population in thirty years. Athens has a well-furnished and rather a flourishing appearance, for the same reason that Nauplia looks out upon the beautiful Bay of Argos in such a state of woeful dismantlement and dilapidation : the court has left the Argive city, and travelled to the Attic; and all the gilded gingerbread, which you call prosperity, has gone with it. Let no man be hasty to draw sanguine promises of Greek prosperity from anything good or glittering that may delight his eyes in the streets of Athens. That splendid palace of the little German prince, now called King of Greece, with its fine well-watered gardens without, and its fine pictures within, and its large dancing-saloon, the wonder even of London beauties-this palace was a mere toy of the boy's poetical papa, and has no more to do with the progress of real prosperity in Greece than a wax-doll has to do with life and organisation. Nay, it may be most certainly affirmed, that not a small part of that sudden growth of

the capital of Greece is, with reference to the country at large, a positive evil, a brilliant excrescence, which owes its existence altogether to the artificial attraction of the nutritive fluids of the body politic to one prominent point, while the largest and most useful limbs are left without their natural supply. If there are shining white palaces, and green Venetian blinds, in one Greek city, there is desolation and dreariness, stagnation and every sort of barbarism, in the fields. But "commerce flourishes;" it has doubled, says Sir A. Alison, since the battle of Navarino. Be it so. Patras is a goodly city, preferable, in some points, to Athens, we think; but were there not rich merchants at Hydra before the Revolution? and are the Greeks at Patras more prosperous than at Salonica, at Odessa, at Trieste, at Leghorn, at Manchester? There were always clever merchants among the Greeks, just as generally as there are sharp bankers and money-changers among Jews and Armenians. We

would by no means despair of Young Greece; there is much to admire in her, especially her schools, university, and the wonderful culture of her deathless language in its most recent shape; and only in a fit of foolish pettishness would any Englishman entertain the thought of blotting her again out of the map of nations, for any of the many sins she has committed, whether by her own fault, orwhat we suspect to be the real truth

by the ignorant and officious agency of German bureaucratists, AngloFrench constitutionalists, and Muscovite diplomatists. Nevertheless, in so slippery a science as politics, and with creatures so difficult to manage as human beings, it is always better to avoid the temptation of drawing panoramic pictures in rose colour; and with regard to Greece, a country to which humanity owes so much, our first duty, in the present very critical state of Europe, is to look soberly at a reality full of perilous problems, and to possess our souls in patience.