t were realized. The canker of
brigandage defied all efforts to root it out, and in spite of the loans
with which the royal government was supplied by the protecting powers, the
public finance was subject to periodical breakdowns. In 1837 King Otto,
now of age, took the government into his own hands, only to have it taken
out of them again by a revolution in 1843. Thereafter he reigned as a
constitutional monarch, but he never reconciled himself to the position,
and in 1862 a second revolution drove him into exile, a scapegoat for the
afflictions of his kingdom. Bavarian then gave place to Dane, yet the
afflictions continued. In 1882 King George had been nineteen years on the
throne[1] without any happier fortune than his predecessor's. It is true
that the frontiers of the kingdom had been somewhat extended. Great
Britain had presented the new sovereign with the Ionian Islands as an
inaugural gift, and the Berlin Conference had recently added the province
of Thessaly. Yet the major part of the Greek race still awaited liberation
from the Turkish yoke, and regarded the national kingdom, chronically
incapacitated by the twin plagues of brigandage and bankruptcy, with
increasing disillusionment. The kingdom of Hellas seemed to have failed in
its mission altogether.

[Footnote 1: King George, like King Otto, was only seventeen years old
when he received his crown.]

What was the explanation of this failure? It was that the very nature of
the mission paralysed the state from taking the steps essential to its
accomplishment. The phenomenon has been, unhappily, only too familiar in
the Nearer East, and any one who travelled in the Balkans in 1882, or even
so recently as 1912, must at once have become aware of it.

Until a nation has completely vindicated its right to exist, it is hard
for it to settle down and make its life worth living. We nations of
western Europe (before disaster fell upon us) had learnt to take our
existence for granted, and 'Politics' for us had come to mean an organized
effort to improve the internal economy of our community. But a foreigner
who picked up a Greek newspaper would have found in it none of the matter
with which he was familiar in his own, no discussion of financial policy,
economic development, or social reconstruction. The news-columns would
have been monopolized by foreign politics, and in the cafes he would have
heard the latest oscillation in the international balance of power
canvass