Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

The papers laid before Parliament prove the worthlessness of Mr Piscatory’s diplomacy; but the conduct of Lord Palmerston cannot be correctly appreciated, unless we trace the connexion of England and Greece since the convention of 1832, appointing Prince Otho of Bavaria King of Greece, under the protection and guarantee of England, France, and Russia. That treaty, it must be recollected, was the work of Lord Palmerston. King Otho was selected by Lord Palmerston; he was conveyed to Greece by Lord Palmerston’s favourite diplomatist, Sir E. Lyons; and it was under Lord Palmerston’s special protection that the Anglo-Bavarian Regency was furnished with £2,400,000, and allowed to destroy the institutions of the Greek nation. These facts embrace the history of British connexion with Greece from 1832 to 1837. Great Britain, or, to speak more correctly, our Foreign Secretary, is morally responsible for the government of the Greek kingdom by Count Armansperg, who ruled far more absolutely than King Otho has ever done, for the simple reason that he had a better filled purse. Sir E. Lyons supported him with vigour alike against Russian and French opposition, Greek patriotism, and constitutional principles, as may be seen by a reference to the papers laid before Parliament in July 1836.

In 1837, Armansperg was dismissed from office; but Greece is still suffering from the loss of the institutions he destroyed, and the political corruption he introduced. Coletti, it is true, imitated his political system in the internal government with singular aptitude, but with diminished funds and resources for corruption. Where Armansperg could appoint an amnestied brigand a captain of infantry, Coletti could only make some old friend a policeman, or peradventure a consul.

In 1837 the Government of Greece broke off its intimate connexion with England, and the English Minister at Athens became involved in a succession of quarrels with the court. It is not necessary for us to prove that the Bavarian Administration from 1837 to 1843 was bad. All parties agree that it was intolerable; and the Greeks were universally applauded when they expelled the whole tribe of Bavarian officials. King Otho had fallen into an error that might have been expected from a Whig-created king; he had neglected all the real duties of royalty, and transacted the business of his under-secretaries of state.

The circumstances that have determined the position of our relations with Greece, since the Constitution of 1844, occurred in the preceding period. Lord Palmerston’s first quarrel with the Greek court dates from 1837, and originated in the dissatisfaction then felt, because the British Minister at Athens did not possess as much influence with King Otho’s Government as he had possessed with Count Armansperg’s. The avowed object of British diplomacy, at that period, was to force the adherents of the English party into office; and King Otho incurred the enmity of England for preferring the counsels of France and Russia. The first pitched battle between Greece and England was fought about the waistcoat of the British Minister’s groom. The question was, whether the waistcoat worn by Sir E. Lyons’ groom in his stable dress, and in which he had been carried off to prison for squirting water on a policeman, was or was not a livery waistcoat. After several weeks’ deliberation, the Greek court decided, that, although they did not consider the waistcoat in question to be a livery waistcoat, yet, in consideration of the fact that the British Minister called it his livery, the Government of Greece was ready to make every concession that could be required to heal the wounded honour of Great Britain. Parliament had a narrow escape of seeing the waistcoat laid before both Houses. Now this is very silly. Yet there is no doubt that the arrest of the groom was an intentional insult.

This affair was enacted to lower the English minister in the eyes of the populace, and compel the English Government to change him. Everybody in Greece knew that the groom was sent to prison; few Greeks believed that the Government had apologised for the insult; indeed, nothing but the sight of a policeman chained before the British legation for twenty-four hours could have reintegrated the name of England at Athens, so stoutly did all Government officials declare that no apology was ever made. Another scene was exhibited for the satisfaction of the court and the _corps diplomatique_. At a private theatrical representation in King Otho’s palace, the British minister was left without a chair in the circle, and remained standing during a long comedy. Some ambassadors would have been sorely distressed by this species of physical torture; but the ambassador in question is said to have consoled himself, during this public exhibition of the feelings of protected Greece to protecting England, by the reflection that his turn came next.

A blow was shortly after inflicted on the royalty of Greece, from which it can never recover; but Lord Palmerston is accused of tolerating the use of forbidden weapons by some of his adherents, in his eagerness to make the Greek monarch sensible of the impolicy of the conduct of the Hellenic court. Attacks on the person of King Otho, more bold and unsparing than the most malignant vituperation of Junius, appeared in a London morning paper, then supposed to be allowed to imbibe some of its inspiration from Downing Street. These communications pretended to come from an anonymous correspondent in Athens, but it was evident the unknown writer was aware of many things that could hardly be known beyond the Bavarian court and the sanctuaries of Downing Street. At least, King Otho drew this conclusion, and apparently on good grounds. This correspondent informed the world, that his Hellenic Majesty, who had been selected by Lord Palmerston, and supported with a loan of £2,400,000, was nevertheless unfit to govern his kingdom; and that a certificate to this effect had been signed by several officers, civil, military, and medical, who were then at Athens in the service of King Otho, and that this certificate had been placed in the hands of King Louis of Bavaria. This strange communication would have passed unnoticed in Greece, had it not been made the subject of conversation by all the English officials, and the attention of Greek statesmen called to it by the British legation and consulates. At last, it was publicly noticed by the Greek press, and an outcry produced. Three of the Bavarians named as having signed the certificate, published a declaration contradicting the statement, in a document bearing date the 11th-23d June 1839, which was printed in the Greek newspapers. The medical and military officers who signed this counter-certificate were dismissed from all their places, and immediately quitted Greece. Very little has been said on this subject since. All parties seem heartily ashamed of their share in the transaction, and the public never discovered the key of the mystery. It is certain, however, that King Otho has given Lord Palmerston and Sir E. Lyons good proof of the falsity of the certificate, if they were ever led into the belief that such a document really existed; for, during ten years, he baffled them both in every diplomatic move, and made their vaunted constitutional policy tend more to the injury of their own reputation than to the diminution of his power.

This episode of the certificate, whether its existence be a fact or a fable, placed an impassable barrier between Lord Palmerston and King Otho. Right or wrong, his Hellenic Majesty held the English foreign secretary responsible for the publication, for he believed that the English Government possessed the power of dragging the calumniator to light, and that it would have used the power had the anonymous correspondent not been protected by a powerful patron. Besides, the King of Greece might well ask, who in England could have acquired the knowledge which enabled this correspondent to attack the person of a monarch under the special protection of Great Britain, without fear of investigation or reply, unless the information came directly from some high diplomatic authority. We need not wonder, therefore, when we find that, from June 1839, hatred to England was the prominent feeling displayed by the Greek court in all its relations with the British cabinet. Lord Palmerston, finding all hope of acquiring influence in the Greek court vain, changed his policy, and became the advocate of constitutional government.

The revolution in 1843 afforded the British cabinet an opportunity of putting our relations with Greece on a proper footing; but the opportunity was lost. Instead of English influence being employed to restore the national institutions destroyed by the Bavarians, it supported the establishment of what is called the constitutional form of government. One of those compilations of political commonplace which the lawgivers of our age are ready, at a week’s notice, to prepare either for Greenland or China, was translated from French pamphlets, and entitled the _Constitution of Greece_. Lord Aberdeen, who was then foreign secretary, committed as great a blunder in engaging Great Britain to stand godfather to this constitution, as Lord Palmerston had done in making Old England guardian to King Otho. The following are the words in which the British Government thought fit to record its approbation of this inane waste of time and paper,—“Her Majesty’s Government have viewed with no less satisfaction the admirable temper which appears to have generally prevailed in the Constituent Assembly, throughout the whole of her deliberations on the deeply interesting and important act on which they have been engaged. Such self-command in a popular Assembly, convoked under very exciting and critical circumstances, is highly creditable to the Greek nation. Nor is the result of their labours, as a whole, less entitled to credit for the general soundness of the constitutional principles therein established.”

This, being the deliberate opinion of a British statesman of high character, not supposed to be infatuated by a blind love of revolutionary doctrines, demands serious examination. Let us see, therefore, what are the principles which received the sanction of the British Government on this occasion. In our opinion, they are precisely those principles that lead with certainty to political anarchy and national demoralisation. This vaunted constitution revived no local habits of business, re-established no parochial usages, improved no provincial institutions, corrected no political immoralities, restored no religious authority, and insured no education to the clergy. It proclaimed universal suffrage to an armed people, and vote by ballot to a mob that cannot write; and these are the principles held up to public approbation for their _general soundness_! While, as to the proofs of admirable temper and self-command displayed by this assembly, these feelings were surely not expressed in the decree by which this good-tempered assembly excluded all their countrymen, who had immigrated to the Greek territory since the year 1828, from official employments. There are, perhaps, some who may feel inclined to observe to us, as Rob Roy did to his kinsman, Bailie Nicol Jarvie, when they met in the Tolbooth of Glasgow, “Hout, tout! man, let that flee stick in the wa’; when the dirt’s dry it will rub out.” Be it so; but there are political blunders that leave a stain, which neither time nor repentance can efface.

We believe that the source of Lord Aberdeen’s error arose from his wish to treat Greece as an independent state. But Greece under the protection of the three powers, and loaded with debt, could not be an independent power. False appearances always produce evil consequences. Lord Palmerston had been in too great a hurry to make the bantling monarchy of the treaty of 1832 walk without a baby-jumper, and his rivalry with Warwick the king-maker was not more glorious than his emulation of Mr Winkle. He ought to have perceived that sundry Klephtopiratic excrescences, like the protuberances on the body of a young bear, required to be carefully licked into shape. Our Foreign Secretary delayed the operation too long; and, when he perceived the dangers that had resulted from his negligence, he erroneously fancied that a licking of a different kind, applied by Admiral Parker to King Otho’s Government, would set all right.

When the Greek monarchy was founded in 1832, it was the duty of Lord Palmerston to have laid before Parliament detailed answers to the following questions, as a justification of the course he had pursued in engaging Great Britain to protect the new state, and furnish it with a loan of £2,400,000. The questions, in perfect ignorance of which the character of England was compromised, and the money wasted, were:—

1. What were the actual means of government in the country, and the nature of the parochial, communal, borough, provincial and central administrative institutions, which had enabled the Greeks to maintain a war against Sultaun Mahmoud and Mahommed Ali for seven years? Enthusiasm and patriotism are good words in a debate, and may explain the events of a single campaign; but common sense tells every one that a people must possess some administrative institutions, in order to persist in a desperate struggle for many successive years. If Greece had no institutions in 1832, she was clearly unfit to receive a king; and the duty of the Three Protecting Powers was to frame a system of administration, not to choose a monarch. But on the other hand, if the foundations of political government already existed, it was especially the duty of Great Britain to see that these foundations or local institutions were improved, and not destroyed, by the new Government.

2. What were the land and sea forces necessary to maintain order on shore, and guard the Grecian seas from piracy; and how could these forces be immediately subjected to the system of discipline, which the protecting powers might consider indispensable?

3. What measures were requisite, in order to enable the mass of the population to turn their attention to profitable branches of industry without loss of time?

And 4. What were the financial resources of the country? What was the amount of the debts contracted by the Government during the revolutionary war? What sum would be required to supply the deficit in the annual expenditure for the first year of the new monarch’s reign; and what sum would be required to be set apart annually for paying the interest of the debts of the Greek state, now converted into a European kingdom?

Strange as it may seem, there is not the slightest information on these important questions in the papers laid before Parliament in 1832; and we believe that, had Lord Palmerston taken the trouble to collect even the limited information we have specified, before he involved Great Britain in a guarantee of King Otho’s throne, he would have perceived that it was not necessary to burden Greece either with a new debt or the presence of a foreign army. Great Britain would then have prevented the regency from destroying the existing institutions, and saved the country from the administrative corruption that ruined the despotic royalty of King Otho, and promises very soon to annihilate his constitutional monarchy.

One advantage might have been obtained for Greece by the constitution of 1844, if either the Greeks or their sovereign had known how to profit by it. The direct influence of the protecting powers in the internal affairs of the country was greatly diminished. Unfortunately, Mr Coletti did not avail himself of this circumstance to lead the Greeks to make one single improvement in the interior. Not a road was made, or a packet established. Coletti was, nevertheless, a favourite minister with King Otho, for he fomented the King’s aversion to England, and carried on an active warfare with Sir E. Lyons.

When Mr Wyse arrived at Athens last year, as British minister, he found 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.

The vote by ballot is converted into a constitutional method of counteracting any evil effects that might otherwise arise to ministerial candidates from the use of universal suffrage; for man is fallible, and the Greeks felt inclined, in some places, to oppose the system of Coletti. We recommend the plan adopted to the attention of an eminent historian of ancient Greece, who has more faith in the wood of the ballot-box than in the moral responsibility of the elector. When the number of electors in a district was about five thousand, and it was feared that three thousand might vote against the government candidates, and only two thousand in their favour, the ballot-boxes were doctored beforehand, by having one thousand votes placed in them before the process of the public ballot commenced. Intimidation was resorted to, to prevent at least one thousand of the real voters from attending, and it was generally successful with the middle classes; but, in one unlucky district, which contained only about four thousand voters, six thousand tickets were found in the ballot-box. At times, the success of the opposition was so great, that nothing could be done at the time of voting. The persons charged to convey the ballot-box to the place appointed for the scrutiny, were, in such cases, waylaid by armed bands, and the ballot-boxes were destroyed. These scenes were enacted even in Attica. We believe that, in order to secure free institutions to any people, it is more necessary to create a feeling of moral responsibility, than to protect the electors from the effects of intimidation and fraud merely when they exercise the franchise. National liberty cannot be protected by a wooden box; it must be fought for boldly before the face of all mankind. The vote by ballot injures the nation more than it protects the individual; and it can only cease to do harm in a state of society where perfect equality reigns among the electors themselves, and between the electors and the elected.

With regard to the Greek Senate, we have little to say. In a country where not one single element of an aristocracy exists, and where it was impossible to secure superior education in the members of a chamber appointed for life, it was evident that one chamber would afford a better guarantee against bribery and corruption than two. No nobles, no independent gentlemen, no dignified clergy, no learned lawyers, can enter the Greek Senate. The qualification of a senator is a certain period of service in official appointments, which have been generally held by men who can neither read nor write. The consequence is, that the Senate is utterly useless as a legislative body, from the ignorance of its members; while the nature of the materials from which it is composed, render it a more servile instrument, in the hands of every minister, than the elective chamber. It was yesterday a tool in the hands of Coletti—to-morrow it may become one in those of Mavrocordatos. It would be an object of contempt, were it not an expensive instrument of oppression.

We have now shown what the constitution has effected; let us turn to consider what measures Great Britain ought to have recommended to the attention of the national assembly, when it was occupied in framing this constitution. The first great national question was municipal reform. Unless the people could be intrusted with the direction of the affairs of their own districts, it was unwise to entrust them with a direct control over the national legislation and expenditure. Men take a more lively interest in the trifling details of their own households, and in affairs that pass under their own eyes, and with which they are perfectly cognisant, than they do about more distant though more important matters. Had the people in Greece been allowed to administer their local affairs, they would have drawn much of their attention from party struggles about which they knew very little, to devote it to business they perfectly understood. No guarantee for the permanent existence of Greece, as an independent and free state, can exist, until the present oligarchical constitution of the municipalities throughout the country is destroyed. The mayors must be annually elected by the people, and not removable by the minister of the interior. The accounts of the municipal expenditure must be published quarterly.

The next step towards giving Greece some practical liberty is to abolish universal suffrage. In a country where the election of provincial councillors is regulated by a census, surely the same guarantee ought to be required in the election of legislators. In Greece, everybody is expected to know how to read and write except the national legislators and the King’s ministers. Oligarchy prevails in the municipal institutions, aristocracy in the provincial, democracy in the legislative, and ignorance in the executive; and British statesmen, under whose protection matters have arrived at this condition, express surprise at the anarchy they have themselves nourished, instead of blushing at their own negligence or political incapacity. The vote by ballot had better be abolished, and the senate replaced by a deliberative council of state, composed of men of education capable of preparing laws. The actual representative chamber must only be allowed to sit for two months annually, in order to put an end to the jobbing in which its members have acquired an alarming degree of experience.

The question arises, How are the changes necessary to save Greece to be effected? We believe that there is not moral force in the country to produce the necessary reforms. Greece is now very much in the situation in which England was during the reign of Charles II.; she is exhausted with civil war and party struggles. Besides, she does not possess a body of statesmen, or any statesman, of superior abilities or commanding character. In the present state of things, any ministry that attempted to clean the Augean stable of the administration, would create a degree of opposition, on the part of the court and of the officials in Athens, that would drive him or them from office in less than six months.

If Lord Palmerston desire to save Greece, and secure her a place among independent states, he must lose no time in convoking a conference of England, France, and Russia; and this conference must decide on a practical scheme of administration for the Greek government, and impose a budget on the ministers. The army must be reduced; a navy of packets must be created; roads must be made; the taxes in kind must be gradually commuted; and a field must be opened for the improvement of agriculture. If this is not done, the first great convulsion in the East will put an end to the monarchy created by Lord Palmerston in 1832, and Greece will separate into a number of small cantons, like ancient Hellas and modern Switzerland, or fall under the domination, direct or indirect, of some foreign power. The reputation of Great Britain for political wisdom is, throughout the East, connected with the growth and prosperity of the monarchy she founded: hitherto she has gained very little honour by the share she has taken in the affairs of Greece.

We cannot conclude without making a few observations on Lord Palmerston’s attempt to conquer the islets of Cervi and Sapienza for the Ionian republic. We never knew Lord Palmerston undertake a worse case, nor conduct one in a worse manner. Whether the islands in question belong to King Otho or Sir H. Ward, is a matter about which neither can feel very positive, as it turns on the interpretation of obscure treaties that make no mention of the thing in dispute; and these treaties were in part framed before either of the states now appearing as claimants had an existence.

The facts are, Greece is in possession of two islands. The Ionian republic advances a claim to them. Greece takes no notice of this claim, even when backed by the powerful intervention of England. Lord Palmerston, considering the British Government is not treated with proper courtesy by King Otho, gives orders to seize the islands and deliver them to Sir H. Ward; but, before these orders are executed, he receives an answer from the Greek Government, and recalls his orders. Still he boldly tells the world that he had given these orders, as may be seen in the last despatch printed in the Parliamentary papers. Now this announcement was quite uncalled for, and has very naturally given great offence to the Russian Government, for it was a gratuitous violation of the diplomatic courtesy due to our allies, the joint protectors of Greece. When England found that Greece was withholding property supposed to belong to the Ionian republic, it was clearly her duty, as protector of the Ionian republic, to lay the case before Russia, France, and England, the three protectors of Greece. No want of courtesy on the part of Greece, in leaving the communications of England unanswered, could ever warrant England forgetting what was due to Russia and France, and even to herself. England alone could not pretend to decide whether Cervi and Sapienza belong to Greece or to the Ionian republic. Russia, from her earlier connexion with the Ionian islands, and her more intimate knowledge of Greek and Turkish affairs, was the power best qualified to decide the question; and both Russia and France had a right to take part in deciding it. Had the imprudent order of Lord Palmerston been unfortunately carried into execution, it might have seriously troubled our relations with Russia; even as it is, the unnecessary publicity given to the fact that such an order had been issued, has been viewed as an intentional slight.

These two islands, it must be remembered, have been in the possession of the Greek Government ever since its formation. King Otho found them a part of the Greek territory when it was delivered over to him by the protecting powers in 1833; and as they are within cannon-shot of the shores of Greece, he could hardly doubt that he was their lawful sovereign. But, at all events, we cannot understand what object could be gained by Great Britain taking forcible possession of these paltry little islands, when it was evident that the final decision concerning their property could only be given by Russia and France.

We hope Lord Palmerston has some better argument to plead before these two powers than he has communicated to Greece in his despatch of the 9th February last, as given in the correspondence presented to Parliament. If not, his case is lost. The geography and the logic of this document are equally defective. As a proof that these islands belong to the Ionian state, he cites an act of the Ionian legislature dated in the year 1804, in which they are enumerated as portions of the territory of the republic. This act, however, does not even prove that they were ever occupied by the Ionian government. The legislature of Great Britain, when Lord Palmerston was a young man, was in the habit of enumerating France as an appendage of the crown of England; the King of France used to boast of himself as King of Navarre, without Europe attaching much importance to the enumeration of territory in the possession of others. The Sultan does not trouble his head about the pretensions of the Kings of Sardinia and Naples to the kingdom of Jerusalem; so that King Otho may be excused for not paying more attention to the Ionian claim to Cervi and Sapienza, than he does to the Spanish claim to the Duchy of Athens and New Patras.

Nor does Lord Palmerston strengthen his argument when he declares, that no island belongs to Greece except those expressly enumerated in the protocol of the 3d of February 1830. If this dictum of his lordship be correct, neither Hydra, Spetzia, Poros, Ægina, nor Salamis, would belong to Greece, which is manifestly absurd; unless, indeed, Lord Palmerston supposes these islands are included under the name of Cyclades, which would be still more absurd, for it is wiser to quarrel with King Otho than with Strabo.

This imprudent attack on Greece lays the despatch open to reply; for though Lord Palmerston is proved to be wrong when he says that no island, except those expressly enumerated in the protocol of 3d February 1830, can belong to Greece, he is right in maintaining that the legislative act of the Ionian republic in 1804 cannot advance a claim to any island not enumerated in it. Now only one island of Cervi is mentioned in that act, and that island will be found laid down on the west side of Cerigo, with the Greek name of Elaphonisi, which is identical with the Italian name Cervi, in the map of Greece published by Arrowsmith, which we believe was the one used at the conference on the 3d February 1830. It corresponds in size, form, and value, with the island of Dragonera, situated on the east side of Cerigo, which is enumerated immediately before it in the legislative act of 1804. The island of Cervi on the coast of Greece does not, therefore, belong to the Ionian republic.

THE MODERN ARGONAUTS.

I.