lonian insurrections were the only serious dis-
turbances during the half century of British rule ;
and even they were primarily agrarian rather than
anti-British, although the discontent of the
peasantry was ably exploited by the Unionist agita-
tors, who belonged to the educated class, and who
desired nothing so much as political martyrdom.
It became immediately evident that the Assembly
was hard to manage. Well-meaning reforms were
blocked by an alliance of the two extreme parties,
because the Radicals did not want to lose their
grievances and thus jeopardize the Unionist
movement, while the " Subterranean " party did
not want to lose its privileges. The High Com-
missioner committed the tactical mistake of
catering for the moderate vote at the expense of
the nobility and gentry who were devoted sup-
porters of the protectorate, which was thus
gradually left with little backing. The anti-
Greek policy of Palmerston in the Don Pacifico
case and the measures taken against Greece during
the Crimean War had an unfavourable effect in
the islands, and in Cephalonian schools " a prayer
5
66 A HISTORY OF THE GREEK PEOPLE
for the expulsion of the English " was given out
as a copybook heading ! The foreign press began
to depict the benevolently governed Ionian
Islands as a Mediterranean Ireland, and the pro-
tectors themselves became at last weary of their
thankless task. In 1858 a London newspaper
published a secret dispatch of the then High
Commissioner, Sir John Young, proposing the
cession of all the islands to Greece, except Corfu and
Paxo, which should be made a British colony.
This proposal had the advantage of retaining for
Great Britain the islands which had most strategic
value, as commanding the mouth of the Adriatic,
and were also by far the least disaffected ; but its
inopportune publication aroused patriotic indigna-
tion in the Assembly and embarrassed the great
statesman, who was then on his way out to Corfu
as " High Commissioner Extraordinary " to the
islands Gladstone.
Gladstone possessed two qualifications which
Avould make him popular with the lonians his
classical learning and his interest in the Orthodox
Church, for he reverenced a Greek bishop as much
as a Greek classic. But he lacked local knowledge,
and his offers of reform were met, wherever he
went, with demands for union, particularly loud
in Cephalonia, but expressed, though with less
vehemence, in Zante, the stronghold of the Radical
politician, Lombardos, who was Britain's leading
opponent in the islands. Undaunted by this
reception, the great parliamentarian offered, and
THE INTERREGNUM 67
was appointed, to succeed Young as temporary
High Commissioner for the purpose of laying his
scheme of reform before the Assembly. The
Assembly replied with a vote for union ; their
motion, transformed into a petition to the Home
Government, was rejected, and he introduced a
sweeping diminution of the Civil Service and
proposed to halve the deputies' salaries reforms
economically sound, but politically unwise, because
they further embittered the Radicals and simul-
taneously alienated those vested interests which
were the mainstay of the protectorate. While his
scheme was still under discussion he had hastily
to leave for home, while Sir Henry Knight Storks,
who was destined to be the last High Commissioner,
had to meet a situation still further injured by
the Gladstonian mission, and soon made worse
by the Italian war against Austria. For not only
had Corfu sheltered Italian exiles, but the public
utterances of British statesmen in favour of
Italy's right to self-determination were quoted
inconveniently by lonians as logically applicable
to themselves.
Gladstone from his place in Parliament still
defended the protectorate, but in 1862 it had
already been decided to give up the islands, and
the Queen's speech of 1863 made union contingent
on the lonians' desire for it a desire too often
expressed to be uncertain to those who knew the
real feelings of the politicians. Accordingly, the
treaty of 1863, which fixed the conditions of King
68 A HISTORY OF THE GREEK PEOPLE
George's accession, pledged the British to cede
the islands if the Ionian Parliament desired, and
the Powers consented to a revision of the treaty
of 1815 in this sense. But there were certain
local conditions the preservation of the British
cemeteries, an annual charge on the Ionian treasury
of 10,000 for the new King, the payment of
certain pensions by the Greek Government, the
abandonment of various Ionian claims, and (at
the wish of Austria and Turkey) the neutralization
of Corfu and Paxo and the destruction of certain
of the Corfiote forts. These last two conditions
caused much criticism, but the neutrality of Corfu
has been useful to Greece as an argument against
the modern Italian claim that the channel between
that island and the mainland might become a
naval station threatening the Adriatic. On June 2,
1864, Thrasyboulos Zai'mes formally received the
islands in the name of King George.
While the union of the islands was an unmixed
gain to Greece, whom it provided with politicians
and diplomatists of a more finished culture than
was then common on the mainland, it was differ-
ently viewed by the lonians, or rather by the
Corfiotes, who lost most by the withdrawal of the
British garrison and officials, according as it was
considered from a national or a material stand-
point. The poor Greek Government did not,
and could not, spend upon the islands what the
British had spent. Roads fell into disrepair, the
gaiety of Corfiote society ceased, money no longer
THE INTERREGNUM 69
circulated, and comfortable official jobs were no
longer common at Corfu. Corfiote titles of nobility,
accepted by the British, aroused a smile in
democratic Athens. In place of a constantly
resident and highly-paid High Commissioner, his
Corfiote villa of Man Repos was rarely tenanted
by King George. But these disadvantages were
outweighed by ethnological and national con-
siderations, and the profit was shared by Great
Britain. Her rule had not, and could not have
been, a success, although no other foreign Power
and least of all some of her autocratic critics
could have governed better. There was in the
latter days of the protectorate a lack of sympathy
between the governed and their protectors ;
social intercourse between them became rarer ;
and while the British became more aggressively
British, the lonians felt themselves more Greek.
The cession of the islands serves as several historic
lessons : it proclaimed in the face of an egoistic
world the altruism of Great Britain ; it served to
the Greeks as a stepping-stone for the union with
Crete ; it may be a warning to the Italians that,
if the British, admittedly past-masters in the art
of governing foreign dependencies, failed by
material benefits to succeed in quenching the
national aspirations of the Greeks in Corfu and
Cyprus, they cannot hope to succeed in the Dodek-
anese. National gratitude is a doubtful quantity ;
but a possible foreign ally is better than a discon-
tented foreign subject.
CHAPTER VI
THE CONSTITUTION AND THE CRETAN
QUESTION (1864-9)
THE eighty-four Ionian deputies elected
to the National Assembly at Athens
arrived in time to participate in the long-
drawn discussion of the new Greek Constitution.
Months wore on, and at last the King intimated
that, if Greece were not speedily provided with a
Constitution, he might return to Denmark. The
pace was thereupon quickened ; as usually happens
in parliamentary debates, the last articles were
hurried through the Assembly ; and before
November was over, the King had taken the oath
to the new Constitution, the second since Greece
had become a kingdom, the sixth since the War of
Independence began. With a few alterations it
governed Greece for forty-six years.
The Constitution of 1864 began by abolishing
the Senate, and thencefore Greece has had no
second chamber. The Othonian Senate had not
justified its existence, and in a country (with the
exception of the Ionian Islands) so democratic
and at that time so poor, an aristocratic or pluto-
cratic second chamber would have been impossible.
70
THE CRETAN QUESTION 71
It was, indeed, attempted to have some check
upon the Chamber in the shape of a Council of State
of some fifteen or twenty persons, such as Otho had
had in the early part of his reign ; but this pro-
posal, adopted by a small majority, was abolished
by the next legislature, for the section of the
Constitution which included it was alone liable
to immediate revision, while the lapse of ten
years, a largely supported demand in two successive
legislatures and a revisionary Chamber of twice
the ordinary number of deputies were essential
to the revision of the rest. Thus, Greece was
committed to an unchecked, omnipotent, single
Chamber, a pure democracy, tempered only by
the fact that in all forms of Government, auto-
cratic, oligarchic or democratic, in practice the
real power is usually concentrated in the hands of
a few persons. Still, no country probably presented
so clear an example of parliamentarism as Greece
between 1864 and 1910. The Boule was elected
by manhood suffrage and the ballot for four
years, in proportion to the population. But
the historic services of the " Nautical Islands "
gained special representation for the inhabitants
of Hydra, Spetsai and New Psara. Obstruction
was made easy by fixing the quorum at one
more than half the total number of deputies,
which varied at different periods between 150 and
234. Abstention could, therefore, bring business
to a standstill, and accordingly the Constitution
of 1911 reduced the quorum to one-third. The
72 A HISTORY OF THE GREEK PEOPLE
Italian practice of making thirty the earliest age
for election as deputies encouraged experience
at the expense of enthusiasm ; their further re-
striction to natives or residents in their respective
constituencies favoured local men and at times
excluded statesmen of European reputation. The
admission as deputies of naval and military
officers tended to sacrifice discipline to politics.
Payment of members was inevitable ; a less
desirable feature was the custom of making
the civil service, instead of being permanent,
largely depend upon Ministerial crises. This
turned practically every one into a political
meteorologist, for upon the political barometer
at Athens might depend the future of himself or
his friends. Cabinets came and went rapidly,
to the detriment of continuous administration,
but to the great interest of the people, who re-
gard politics as the most fascinating of pursuits,
and even that most constitutional sovereign,
King George, dismissed in his all but fifty years'
reign six Ministries, which had not been made by
the Chamber to resign.
One or two Ionian questions caused difficulties.
The lonians wanted political union with Greece,
but ecclesiastical union (which they had retained
under the protectorate) with the Patriarch at
Constantinople ; some of them opposed the
immediate introduction of an uniform fiscal
system. In the latter they were successful ; the
Patriarch was induced to abandon his Ionian
THE CRETAN QUESTION 73
jurisdiction to the Metropolitan of Athens ; the
Ionian Church was finally united to that of Greece
in 1866, but the existing Metropolitan of Corfu
was allowed to continue the use of that title.
Scarcely had the Ionian question been settled
and the new Constitution put into operation than
a fresh disturbing force diverted attention to
foreign politics in the shape of a great Cretan
insurrection. Crete had had an even longer ex-
perience of foreign domination than Corfu ; like
Corfu, it had been Venetian for over four centuries ;
unlike Corfu, it had then been Turkish for nearly
two. Its history under the first 160 years of
Venetian rule had been an almost constant record
of insurrections ; under the Turks it had been
complicated by the fact that the Cretan Moslems
were of the same Greek race as the Cretan Christians,
and, as is usually the case with renegades, more
fanatical than those born in the religion usually
associated with their nationality. The Sphakiotes,
who occupied much the same position in Turkish
Crete as the Mainates in Turkish Greece, had long
alone enjoyed practical independence, but even
they had paid the capitation tax after 1770.
Soon after the outbreak of the War of Indepen-
dence, which had at first aroused little excitement in
Crete, they rose against the Turks, after massacres
at Canea and Candia ; a Harmostes was sent from
Greece to govern the island ; but Egyptian troops
combined with the indiscipline of the Sphakiotes
to crush the insurrection. It ended in smoke
74 A HISTORY OF THE GREEK PEOPLE
the smoke which suffocated the wretched Christians
in the cavern, where they had taken refuge.
A second Cretan insurrection, organized by
refugees on the islet of Grabousa, the old Venetian
stronghold, which had remained in the hands of
the Republic for twenty-two years after the
Turkish conquest of " the great Greek island,"
broke out after the battle of Navarino, under the
leadership of Hadji Michales, only to end in failure.
Crete sent delegates to the National Assembly
of Argos in 1829, but in 1830 was united to Egypt
under Mehemet Ali, as payment for the services
rendered by him to the Sultan during the war.
The Cretans were, however, to have the right of
free navigation, their own flag, and their own tax-
collectors in the persons of their bishops and
captains. This unnatural union with Egypt
lasted for only ten years ; in 1840, the revolt of
Mehemet Ali from his sovereign was punished by
the retrocession of Crete to Turkey, as one of
the conditions on which he was to have the
hereditary Viceroyalty of Egypt. The Egyptian
rule had been unpopular with Christian and Moslem
Cretans alike ; for the Christians disliked the
Egyptians because they wanted to be joined with
Greece, while the Moslems disliked them because
they wanted to rule the island, as they had under
the almost nominal authority of the Sultan's
representative. Of the two opposing parties,
the Christians had suffered less from the Egyptian
connexion, for they were more favoured than the
THE CRETAN QUESTION 75
Moslems by their Egyptian governors, one of whom
proclaimed his policy to be their deliverance from
their former vexations. They were to have only
two taxes ; justice was to be administered by
two mixed councils. But Mehemet, whose govern-
ment of Egypt was based upon monopolies, soon
increased the number of the taxes and tampered
with the work of the councils ; he alarmed the
landowners by threatening to confiscate all land
left uncultivated for three years a measure
which would have made him the landlord of
much of the island's cultivable area, for the popu-
lation had sunk in twelve years to only 129,000.
whereas it had consisted of 160,000 Moslems and
130,000 Christians at the outbreak of the in-
surrection of 1821.
While the Cretan Moslems asked for redress,
the Cretan Christians agitated for union ; a
" Central Committee," was started in Greece,
and in 1841, a fresh insurrection, started by the
Sphakiotes, began with no better success than
its predecessors. For the next seventeen years
the island was quiet ; but in 1858, the Cretans
threatened to rise, if the reforms promised re-
mained, like most Turkish reforms a dead letter.
Again the motives of the Cretans were mixed :
among the Christians the wish for either union
or a Cretan principality, whose prince should be
the famous Kallerges, whose family had long
been connected with Cretan revolutions ; among
Christians and Moslems alike the fear of further
76 A HISTORY OF THE GREEK PEOPLE
taxation, foreshadowed by a census never a
popular institution in the East. The taxes were,
as a matter of fact, neither heavy nor numerous,
but the example of Hampden shows that when
mankind wishes for a revolution, even a small
tax may serve as the occasion.
The Porte, as usual, pursued a dilatory policy ;
it promised, thereby merely delaying the outbreak
of discontent, which maladministration and two
bad crops increased. Accordingly, in 1866, a
fresh agitation among the Christians became
serious. In its origin this movement was likewise
fiscal, for the Christians' petition to the Sultan
referred primarily to the increase on various
articles of consumption, notably salt, since 1858.
They drew attention to the usual Turkish neglect
of all means of communication within the island
a neglect which continued down to the end of its
connexion with Turkey ; they demanded a rural
bank, which should lend money at reasonable
interest ; they complained that the judgments of
the courts were given in Turkish, to them a foreign
language, that a Moslem's word in the witness-
box outweighed that of a Christian, and that
schools were lacking. The Porte first delayed,
and then refused to remit taxes, thus giving the
party of action in both Crete and Athens time to
influence the others. The Porte, which by this
time, like most of their foreign rulers, had found
the Cretans as hard to govern as England found
the Irish, then reverted to the policy of 1830,
THE CRETAN QUESTION 77
and meditated the reunion of Crete with Egypt,
indeed, the Egyptians offered to concede several
of the points in the Cretan petition, if the Cretans
would join them. The Cretan reply was the
abolition of Ottoman rule in an Assembly held
at Sphakia, and the proclamation of union with
Greece, despite the warnings of Lord Clarendon
and the lessons which he drew from the material
results of the union of the Ionian Islands, as if
Turkish rule were comparable to the British
protectorate.
This insurrection, which lasted till 1869, was
much more serious than those above mentioned.
The Cretans are the best fighters of all the Greeks ;
they have the redoubled love of both highlanders
and islanders for independence, and their moun-
tainous island is an extremely difficult country to
subdue. Greece was intensely interested in their
struggle for union, and there were a number of
Cretans at Athens who kept up public excite-
ment. But the Greek Government, warned by the
example of 1854, remained nominally neutral,
looking on while volunteers embarked for Crete,
although Koumoundouros, when Premier, as be-
fitted an old insurgent of 1841, prepared for war.
The insurgents, whose chiefs were Zymbrakakes,
a Cretan officer in the Greek army, and Koronaios,
the commander of the Greek national guard, met
with varying fortunes, but the heroism of Maneses,
the Abbot of Arkadion, who blew up the powder-
magazine rather than surrender his monastery
78 A HISTORY OF THE GREEK PEOPLE
to the Turks, and the massacre which followed
greatly assisted the Cretan cause abroad and
strained Greek neutrality almost to breaking-
point. Meanwhile, of the Powers, Great Britain
alone opposed the French proposal for a Cretan
plebiscite ; France and Russia, in 1867, openly
advocated union, in the real interest of Turkey,
as well as of Crete, for the island was an useless
encumbrance and a source of trouble to the
Turkish Empire. For the second time union was
postponed, with the result of further insurrections,
and the postponement of a final settlement till
1912.
The course of the insurrection was marked by
alternate attempts at conciliation on the part
of the Porte and atrocities, such as those which
had been perpetrated in 1823. One general de-
stroyed 600 villages, but his campaign cost him
over 20,000 men. Military measures having
failed, the "Organic Statute of 1868," which
governed the island till 1878, was compiled to
pacify the insurgents. Crete, divided into five
provinces, was provided with a vdli, two Assessors
(one a Christian), and a mixed Council of Ad-
ministration ; Greek and Turkish were both to be
official languages ; a General Assembly was to
meet annually at Canea, and there were to be no
fresh taxes. Despite the " Organic Statute,"
however, the provisional government continued
the languishing struggle with no decisive result
for either side. But the departure of the Mainate
THE CRETAN QUESTION 79
chief, Petropoulakes, from Athens with fresh
volunteers, provoked a Turkish ultimatum to
Greece and nearly anticipated the Greco-Turkish
War of 1897. As Gladstone simultaneously be-
came Prime Minister, the Greeks hoped that he
would advocate the union of Crete as he had
helped the union of the Ionian Islands. Kou-
moundouros, then in opposition, urged the Govern-
ment to war, while the presence of many Cretan
refugees in Athens embarrassed it further. Its
reply to the ultimatum was such that the Turkish
Minister left, and the situation became daily more
critical. Then Bismarck stepped in with the
proposal of a Conference in Paris of the signatories
of the treaty of 1856, which had ended the Crimean
War. Both Greece and Turkey accepted a de-
claration that Greece would allow neither armed
bands nor armed vessels for the purpose of aggression
against Turkey.
Thus the Cretan question, soluble in 1867,
was in 1869 left unsolved ; the Cretan insurrection
died of inanition, a Liberal governor-general was
sent to the island and diplomatists fondly hoped
that a formula had quieted Crete. One disastrous
result of this Cretan insurrection was the lesson
which it impressed upon Turkish statesmen
that their wisest policy was to separate the Greeks
from their other Christian subjects by establishing
a separate Bulgarian Church. For since the fall of
the Bulgarian Patriarchate, the seat of which was
Trnovo, the capital of the mediaeval Bulgarian
80 A HISTORY OF THE GREEK PEOPLE
Empire, in 1394, the Bulgarians had been under
the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the (Ecumenical
Patriarch. Thus the Turks had governed their
bodies, the Greeks had looked after their souls
a labour which, in the Near East, is apt to be
regarded as a branch of political propaganda.
But, in 1870, a firman was issued, at the in-
stigation of Ignatyeff, the Russian Ambassador
at Constantinople, creating a Bulgarian Exarchate,
which comprised nearly all the Turkish vilayet
of the Danube, and extending the Exarch's juris-
diction over such other districts as might welcome
it by a two-thirds' majority. The (Ecumenical
Patriarch in vain for two years delayed the
nomination of the first Exarch, whom he re-
garded much as a mediaeval Pope regarded an
anti-Pope. When all else failed, he excom-
municated the Exarch and his clergy as schismatics.
Unhappily, the conflict was not limited to these
purely spiritual weapons. From that moment
there were sown the seeds of the Macedonian
question, which was to become the curse of a
once flourishing region and the riddle of European
diplomacy. The creation of a Bulgarian princi-
pality in 1878 increased the struggle. Rival
Governments at Sofia and Athens intrigued at
Constantinople, where the Exarch took up his
residence cheek by jowl with his rival, the Patriarch,
for the bestowal of every vacant Macedonian
bishopric upon a divine of their own race, who,
when appointed, became an ardent nationalist
THE CRETAN QUESTION 81
propagandist. As is usual in the Balkans, propa-
ganda soon took the form of physical violence.
Armed bands made Macedonia a desert, and
peasants, described as Exarchists and Patriarchists,
killed their brethren of the Orthodox or " Schis-
matic " fold with more zest than if they had been
Turks. Meanwhile, the Turks had gained their
object that of dividing the Christian forces.
When, as in 1912, those forces were united against
the Turks, the Balkan Christians were irresistible ;
when, as in 1897, they were disunited, the Turks
won an easy victory. Tantum religio potuit
suadere malorum. Other non-Hellenic races, fired
by the success of the Bulgarians, began to agitate
for separate Churches of their own the Serbians
for the restoration of their historic Patriarchate
of Petch (Ipek) ; the Roumanians for a Rou-
manian establishment. At present, there is a
movement for an independent Albanian Church,
with the object of undermining Hellenism in South
Albania. Thus, judged by its results, the Bul-
garian Exarchate was the worst blow which
Hellenism received during the nineteenth century.
CHAPTER VII
THE EASTERN CRISIS OF 1876 TO 1886
THE seven years following the conclusion
of the Cretan insurrection were mainly
occupied with internal affairs. In 1869,
a most important event occurred the opening
of the first Greek railway, that uniting the capital