as an object of partition or
acquisition, and Greek revolts have all at once become, according to the
declaration of Laybach, "criminal combinations." The recent congress at
Verona exceeded its predecessor at Laybach in its denunciations of the
Greek struggle. In the circular of the 14th of December, 1822, it
declared the Grecian resistance to the Turkish power to be rash and
culpable, and lamented that "the firebrand of rebellion had been thrown
into the Ottoman empire." This rebuke and crimination we know to have
proceeded on those settled principles of conduct which the Continental
powers had prescribed for themselves. The sovereigns saw, as well as
others, the real condition of the Greeks; they knew as well as others
that it was most natural and most justifiable, that they should
endeavor, at whatever hazard, to change that condition. They knew that
they themselves, or at least one of them, had more than once urged the
Greeks to similar efforts; that they themselves had thrown the same
firebrand into the midst of the Ottoman empire. And yet, so much does it
seem to be their fixed object to discountenance whatsoever threatens to
disturb the actual government of any country, that, Christians as they
were, and allied, as they professed to be, for purposes most important
to human happiness and religion, they have not hesitated to declare to
the world that they have wholly forborne to exercise any compassion to
the Greeks, simply because they thought that they saw, in the struggles
of the Morea, the sign of revolution. This, then, is coming to a plain,
practical result. The Grecian revolution has been discouraged,
discountenanced, and denounced, solely because it _is_ a revolution.
Independent of all inquiry into the reasonableness of its causes or the
enormity of the oppression which produced it; regardless of the peculiar
claims which Greece possesses upon the civilized world; and regardless
of what has been their own conduct towards her for a century; regardless
of the interest of the Christian religion,--the sovereigns at Verona
seized upon the case of the Greek revolution as one above all others
calculated to illustrate the fixed principles of their policy. The
abominable rule of the Porte on one side, the value and the sufferings
of the Christian Greeks on the other, furnished a case likely to
convince even an incredulous world of the sincerity of the professions
of the Allied Powers. They embraced the occasion with