questioned, can only repeat: 'We can't say why we
happen to speak "Arvanitika", but we are Greeks like everybody else.' The
Vlachs again, a Romance-speaking tribe of nomadic shepherds who have
wandered as far south as Akarnania and the shores of the Korinthian Gulf,
are settling down there to the agricultural life of the Greek village, so
that Hellenism stands to them for the transition to a higher social phase.
Their still migratory brethren in the northern ranges of Pindus are
already 'Hellenes' in political sympathy,[1] and are moving under Greek
influence towards the same social evolution. In distant Cappadocia, at the
root of the Anatolian peninsula, the Orthodox Greek population, submerged
beneath the Turkish flood more than eight centuries ago, has retained
little individuality except in its religion, and nothing of its native
speech but a garbled vocabulary embedded in a Turkified syntax. Yet even
this dwindling rear-guard has been overtaken just in time by the returning
current of national life, bringing with it the Greek school, and with the
school a community of outlook with Hellenism the world over. Whatever the
fate of eastern Anatolia may be, the Greek element is now assured a
prominent part in its future.

[Footnote 1: Greece owed her naval supremacy in 1912-13 to the new cruiser
_Georgios Averof_, named after a Vlach millionaire who made his fortune in
the Greek colony at Alexandria and left a legacy for the ship's
construction at his death.]

These, moreover, are the peripheries of the Greek world; and at its centre
the impulse towards union in the national state readies a passionate
intensity. 'Aren't you better off as you are?' travellers used to ask in
Krete during the era of autonomy. 'If you get your "Union", you will have
to do two years' military service instead of one year's training in the
militia, and will be taxed up to half as much again.' 'We have thought of
that,' the Kretans would reply, 'but what does it matter, if we are united
with Greece?'

On this unity modern Hellenism has concentrated its efforts, and after
nearly a century of ineffective endeavour it has been brought by the
statesmanship of Venezelos within sight of its goal. Our review of
outstanding problems reveals indeed the inconclusiveness of the settlement
imposed at Bucarest; but this only witnesses to the wisdom of the Greek
nation in reaffirming its confidence in Venezelos at the present juncture,
and recalling him to