The Modern Greeks, and the Opinions concerning Them [pp. 143-165]

OPINIONS CONCERNING THEM.
of a poet misanthrope,-"Greece is living Greece no mere," etc.
-written sixty years ago, when Greece was yet in her bondage,
have given the type, seemingly, to the general sentiment, about
her people, held in this country and Great Britain. Indeed,
among the English, it is worse than with us, for the reason that
in the course of her intervention in the affairs of Greece, along
with France and Russia, as subsequent to and consequent
upon the grand interposition of 1827, Great Britain has not
found the little Greek nationality, which she helped to set up,
quite so easy to be manipulated,-the people of that blood and
name, after a servitude of ages, not quite so wise and so docile
as she perhaps very unreasonably expected; and inasmuch as they
are not always so kind and conciliatory with their weaker neighbors
as they might be, the English Government and the people have
not made themselves so popular among the Greeks as they
might have been, and as perhaps they were entitled, on their
real merits, to be. But disappointment, crimination, and recrimination have not sweetened the English temper toward the
protege nationality and people; and some of the facts of
brigandage, especially the fearful, dramatic affair of 1872, near
Marathon, in which the victims were mostly Englishmen, have
contributed to aggravate existing prejudice in our fatherland.
TESTIMONY OF FACTS OF SIXTY YEARS AGO.
But, leaving out events that soon came to pass, and that very
fully refuted the thing, it is a fact that, at the very moment that
Byron's mind gave forth the utterance above referred to, now
become quite oracular, and which made the life of Greece to be
so utterly extinct,-at that very moment Greek merchants were
found residing at all the great ports of the Mediterranean, and
as far as London; Greek commerce was tracking the seas;
Greek mariners were doing the carrying trade of Turkey; and
Greek enterprise was not only bringing wealth to the islanders
of Scio, Spetzos and Hydra, but bringing in modern civilization
and learning to insular and continental Greece; planting col leges at Haivali and Scio, and establishing a printing-press at
the latter. The dreadful tale, that has rung ever since in the
ears of the Christian world, of the sack of Scio in 1822, derives
its horror, in a great measure, from the very fact that it was
1874.]
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