ed with the same intense and minute interest that Englishmen in a
railway-carriage would have been devoting to Old Age Pensions, National
Health Insurance, or Land Valuation. He would have been amazed by a
display of intimate knowledge such as no British quidnunc could have
mustered if he had happened to stumble across these intricacies of
international competition, and the conversation would always have
terminated in the same unanswered but inconscionable challenge to the
future: 'When will the oppressed majority of our race escape the Turkish
yoke? If the Ottoman dominion is destroyed, what redistribution of its
provinces will follow? Shall we then achieve our national unity, or will
our Balkan neighbours encroach upon the inheritance which is justly ours?'

This preoccupation with events beyond the frontiers was not caused by any
lack of vital problems within them. The army was the most conspicuous
object of public activity, but it was not an aggressive speculation, or an
investment of national profits deliberately calculated to bring in one day
a larger return. It was a necessity of life, and its efficiency was barely
maintained out of the national poverty. In fact, it was almost the only
public utility with which the nation could afford to provide itself, and
the traveller from Great Britain would have been amazed again at the
miserable state of all reproductive public works. The railways were few
and far between, their routes roundabout, and their rolling-stock scanty,
so that trains were both rare and slow. Wheel-roads were no commoner a
feature in Greece than railways are here, and such stretches as had been
constructed had often never come into use, because they had just failed to
reach their goal or were still waiting for their bridges, so that they
were simply falling into decay and converting the outlay of capital upon
them into a dead loss. The Peiraeus was the only port in the country where
steamers could come alongside a quay, and discharge their cargoes directly
on shore. Elsewhere, the vessel must anchor many cables' lengths out, and
depend on the slow and expensive services of lighters, for lack of pier
construction and dredging operations. For example, Kalamata, the economic
outlet for the richest part of Peloponnesos, and the fifth largest port in
the kingdom,[1] was and still remains a mere open roadstead, where all
ships that call are kept at a distance by the silt from a mountain
torrent, and so pla