ARTICLE III.-OBSERVATIONS ON THE MODERN

GREEKS.

IN estimating the present condition of the Greeks as a nation, there are several things which must not be left out of view, if we would do them justice. These things are not excuses for their faults or failures, but conditions of their national life-independent, in part, of their character-which have affected their progress.

One of these is the state from which they came into exist ence as a nation, taken together with the shortness of the time that they have had since that event for development. Under the Turkish rule the Greeks were in a state of degrading slavery. It was a slavery worse in many respects than most cases, because the people of quick intellect and progressive spirit served the one of dull mind and stationary habit—the Christian served the Mahometan. Their restlessness under the yoke increased the severity of their masters, just as to-day the Greeks of Asia Minor are better off than the Cretans have been at any time during fifty years. They had no schools but such as they could themselves maintain; no proper means of communication from town to town; no secure possession of the profits of their labor. Then came the war of independ ence, lasting from 1821 to 1829, which completely desolated their country. When they came out of this, they had to start from the very beginning to build up civilization. In Athens, for example, in 1830, there was but one building fit to be inhabited. It is not quite forty years since they began at this point, and forty years in the Levant is not what it is in Chicago.

Another thing to be considered is the small scale of the materials and means which they have had for their progress. The whole population is now a little over one million, having come up quite gradually to that point. Their territory is about nineteen thousand square miles, but less than half of it is cultivable, and of that part only about one-third is in private

hands. Improvident management during the ages of slavery has left the hills bare of vegetation, and, as a natural consequence, the low land suffers from want of water and from floods. While much of the soil is as thin and stony as any in New England, neither climate nor race fit the inhabitants to deal with it as the men of New England have with their rough inheritance. There is under cultivation a little more than an acre of land to every one of the population. In New England, in 1860, the average was a little over four acres to every one of the population. With poor tools and so poor a soil, not much can be expected from agriculture in Greece. The metayer system of rents also increases the distaste of the people for an agricultural life.

Another thing to be considered is the anomalous political condition of the state since it gained independent existence. It has been during these thirty-seven years under a protectorate. The three powers, England, France, and Russia, which gave it independence, bound themselves to secure that independence; and the two former keep each a vessel of war always stationed in the harbor of Athens. This protectorate may have been of advantage to the infant state at first, but it has come to be felt as a burden, and on one occasion, at least-in 1854, when the Greeks made a movement to use the opportunity of the Crimean war to attack their old enemy,-Turkey,— it prevented their action by force. It has given the people a king of foreign birth and race, and in choosing him there has been no thought of special adaptation in character or tastes to the country and people. This has been an underlying cause, tending to excite dissatisfaction at any time. The present king was entirely ignorant of the Greek language and history when he came to the country. Then, too, the artificial limits imposed upon the new state at its creation, excluding Thessaly, Epirus, the Ionian Islands, and Crete, have continually caused disappointment and irritation, and kept the people restless from the wish for more and better territory. The recent cession of the Ionian Islands, by England, has been welcomed by the people of the rest of the kingdom, but even the fervor of Greek patriotism and love of liberty could not raise the islanders themselves above a sort of mercenary regret at the change

from gainful dependence upon England to union with the fortunes of poor, though independent, Greece.

Now making due allowance for these hindrances to progress, let us look for a moment at the actual progress of the country during these thirty-seven years. They have established and kept working a reasonably stable government, with no more revolutions than other and older nations of Continental Europe have had during the same period. They have organized and carried on a system of education, modeled upon that of Germany, which, though it has the usual fault of such systems, a neglect of the lower departments in comparison with the higher, yet does good service and is full of promise for the future. They have built some three hundred miles of road— an amount which appears less insignificant when we consider that the nature of the country makes elaborate engineering, like that of the Alpine passes, necessary almost everywhere. The tonnage of the commercial marine has quadrupled since 1833, and the custom-house receipts have doubled in the last ten years. The population has increased from some six hundred thousand in 1833, to over one million; and Athens, to say nothing of Patras, Syra, Tripolitza, and Kalamáta, has grown from a heap of ruins to a well-lighted, well-built (in the better half of it), and orderly city of fifty thousand inhabitants.

So much, at least, may be said for the actual progress of the Greeks since they became a nation. But these statistics give a somewhat more favorable impression than will be derived from a general view of the present state of society. It has been said that the people were obliged to build up civilization almost from the very beginning. There are still to be found in their social state traces of the barbarism from which they have so recently emerged. To most of these, indeed, it would not be difficult to find parallels in the social history of England within the last hundred years. They offend the more in Greece because they appear side by side with a civilization in other things as advanced as England has now attained, and, may add, with the ruined remains of a civilization which, in its own sphere, no country of modern Europe has surpassed.

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One such trace of barbarist is the existence of brigandage, so often urged as the standing disgrace of the Greek govern

ment. It cannot be denied that brigandage exists, and has existed at intervals ever since the nation began to govern itself. A year ago last August, a prominent politician, who had been minister of finance the previous winter, was seized by brigands at his country house in the Peloponnesus, kept wandering among the hills for thirty-six days, and released on paying a ransom of $10,000. It seems probable that the tendency of the Greeks to this kind of life grew naturally out of the character of their warfare in the revolution of 1821-9. Unable to keep large armies in the fields, they occupied the mountains and passes with irregular, unorganized bands, which harassed and eluded the Turks just as the Cretan insurgents are doing now. These wandering warriors are the heroes of the people's songs and stories still, and their name (παλικάρια, from πάλλαξ ?) is assumed by the brigands continually. The mountainous nature of the country and consequent want of good roads has made it difficult for the government to put them down with regular troops, and left the scattered peasantry to be terrified into concealing their movements and supplying them with food. Northern Greece especially has been at their mercy, because they could defy pursuit by crossing the frontier into Turkey, where, it is said, the wish of the authorities to injure Greece in any way, secures them impunity. After each revolution or interregnum through which the country has passed, there has sprung up a crop of these outlaws, men who have committed some crime in the time of disorder and thus found themselves forced into hostility against society and law to escape punishment. It is difficult to say exactly whose fault it is that this brigandage is not put down. Whose fault is it when a government is weak, in any country? At times it has been put down and kept down, until some general disturbance of society loosened the rule of order again. That the people, as a whole, are capable of self-restraint and respect for law, the bloodless revolution of 1843 satisfactorily showed. It may be true that some political leaders have been weak and wicked enough to use brigands to control votes by intimidation, but something like this has been known to occur once or twice in other countries. As the period of conflict with barbarism recedes into the past, as the system of roads is extend

ed, as the nation becomes habituated to government by a royal family of its own religion, or civilized up to the point of obeying a ruler chosen from among its own sons, this blot upon its character will disappear entirely, as it is disappearing in Italy.

Akin to this is another trace of barbarism, or of semi-barbarous civilization,-the need of guarding the public executioner from the violence of the people. The writer of this Article saw in an old fort on a little island in the harbor of Nauplia, one of the two men who do this public service for the whole kingdom. They are themselves criminals, who saved their heads by undertaking this unpopular duty, and they live always under military guard. Executions are not by hanging, but by beheading with the sword. The passions of individuals are so unrestrained, their minds so little disciplined by the idea of public duty, so little used to distinguishing between the act of the individual and that of the official, that the life of the executioner would not be safe among them. The treatment of criminals in prisons, too, is a disgrace to the country. The want of occupation and of provision for comfort or cleanliness shows the need of such a work as John Howard did for the rest of Europe in the last century. Some among the Greeks themselves see the evil, but do no more than lament that the government is prevented by its poverty from remedying it. It is significant that while Athens has a university building on a greater scale and better adapted to its purpose than most of our colleges have, a number of fine school buildings, and several museums and hospitals, built by government or by private means, the whole kingdom is in want of a good prison, properly built for the purpose.

The position of woman betrays the recent influence of Turkey and the nearness of oriental customs. Marriages are arranged, not by the parties themselves, but by their parents or friends, and often while those most concerned are in their cradles. A lady told me that she had received several offers for one of her sons, but none for the other. It is said that the experiment was tried some years ago, of letting the young people manage the matter themselves, but the first results were so unsatisfactory that the old system was speedily restored. In