he fact that workable veins often lie
near enough to the sea for the produce to be carried straight from mine to
ship, by an endless-chain system of overhead trolleys; so that, once
capital is secured for installing the plant and opening the mine,
profitable operations can be carried on irrespective of the general
economic condition of the country. Trikoupis saw how much potential wealth
was locked up in these mineral seams. The problem was how to attract the
capital necessary to tap it. The nucleus round which have accumulated
those immense masses of mobilised capital that are the life-blood of
modern European industry and commerce, was originally derived from the
surplus profits of agriculture. But a country that finds itself reduced,
like Greece in the nineteenth century, to a state of agricultural
bankruptcy, has obviously failed to save any surplus in the process, so
that it is unable to provide from its own pocket the minimum outlay it so
urgently needs in order to open for itself some new activity. If it is to
obtain a fresh start on other lines, it must secure the co-operation of
the foreign investor, and the capitalist with a ready market for his money
will only put it into enterprises where he has some guarantee of its
safety. There was little doubt that the minerals of Greece would well
repay extraction; the uncertain element was the Greek nation itself. The
burning question of national unity might break out at any moment into a
blaze of war, and, in the probable case of disaster, involve the whole
country and all interests connected with it in economic as well as
political ruin. Western Europe would not commit itself to Greek mining
enterprise, unless it felt confident that the statesman responsible for
the government of Greece would and could restrain his country from its
instinctive impulse towards political adventure.

The great merit of Trikoupis was that he managed to inspire this
confidence. Greece owes most of the wheelroads, railways, and mines of
which she can now boast to the dozen years of his more or less consecutive
administration. But the roads are unfinished, the railway-network
incomplete, the mines exploited only to a fraction of their capacity,
because the forces against Trikoupis were in the end too strong for him.
It may be that his eye too rigidly followed the foreign investor's point
of view, and that by adopting a more conciliatory attitude towards the
national ideal, he might have stre