racted with Europe.'[382]

LATER FORTUNES OF THE ISLANDS

But he held the opinion that it would be nothing less than a crime
against the safety of Europe, as connected with the state and course of
the Eastern question, if England were at this moment to surrender the
protectorate; for if you should surrender the protectorate, what were
you to say to Candia, Thessaly, Albania, and other communities of Greek
stock still under Turkish rule? Then there was a military question.
Large sums of British money had been flung away on fortifications,[383]
and people talked of Corfu as they talked in later years about Cyprus,
as a needed supplement to the strength of Gibraltar and Malta, and
indispensable to our Mediterranean power. People listened agape to
demonstrations that the Ionian islands were midway between England and
the Persian Gulf; that they were two-thirds of the way to the Red Sea;
that they blocked up the mouth of the Adriatic; Constantinople, Smyrna,
Alexandria, Naples, formed a belt of great towns around them; they were
central to Asia, Europe, and Africa. And so forth in the alarmist's
well-worn currency.

Lord Palmerston in 1850 had declared in his highest style that Corfu was
a very important position for Mediterranean interests in the event of a
war, and it would be great folly to give it up. A year later he repeated
that though he should not object to the annexation of the southern
islands to Greece, Corfu was too important a military and naval post
ever to be abandoned by us.[384] As Lord Palmerston changed, so did Mr.
Gladstone change. 'Without a good head for Greece, I should not like to
see the Ionian protectorate surrendered; with it, I should be well
pleased for one to be responsible for giving it up.' Among many other
wonderful suggestions was one that he should himself become that 'good
head.' 'The first mention,' he wrote to a correspondent in parliament
(Jan. 21, 1863), 'of my candidature in Greece some time ago made me
laugh very heartily, for though I do love the country and never laughed
at anything else in connection with it before, yet the seeing my own
name, which in my person was never meant to carry a title of any kind,
placed in juxtaposition with that particular idea, made me give way.'

Meanwhile it is safe to conjecture, for the period with which in this
chapter we are immediately concerned, that in conceiving and drawing up
his Ionian scheme, close contact with libe