may not always succeed in satisfying us touching the grounds of his judgment, there is always manifest in him that instinct of the true historian which never fails to lead to a judgment substantially just. Mr. Finlay loves Greece and her cause with his whole heart; but he is too conscientious, too great, to indulge in panegyric when his duty summons him to condemn. No one who has studied the Greek character from the first days to the last, no one even with any knowledge of the special subject of the revolution, can fail to observe how philosophically, how exactly, Mr. Finlay's analysis and exposition of the causes and events of the war of independence exhibit and develop the real character of the Greeks, or fail to recognize how many features in that character must be essentially changed before the Greek can make good his claim, in the eyes of Western Europe, to fulfil at last the mission with which he started in the world thirty centuries ago. Nor will Western Europe take the bitter and revengeful temper which the Greek is quick to show when his dark side is turned to the light as an earnest of his zeal to reform.

All

One of the most striking features of the revolution, brought out with singular clearness by Mr. Finlay, was its utter failure to develop anywhere great abilities or remarkable characters. It was a revolution begun and carried out solely by the people. The leaders, instead of concentrating and directing, seem to have done their best to divide and harass their efforts. the faults of the Greek character, aggravated by centuries of subjection to a powerful and relentless foe, seem to have started into sudden and frightful activity. Rapacity, cruelty, murder, treachery, cowardice and hate,-plunder, piracy, and lust, no vice and no crime known to men are wanting to darken the memory of that desperate struggle. Yet side by side with all that festering iniquity are recorded some of the purest and most heroic deeds ever done upon earth. At Thermopylæ the best warrior was a Greek, and when at last he fell into the hands of the Turks, and they gave him his choice between apostasy or death on their bivouac fires, he exclaimed, without hesitation, "Bring your gridirons,' was roasted alive.*

*Thiersch, De l'État actuel de la Grèce, &c., II. 123.

and

The proximate cause of the Greek revolution has been ascribed both to the rebellion of Ali Pasha of Joannina, and to the society formed for the regeneration of Greece known as the Philike Hetairia, and composed, as Mr. Finlay remarks, of bankrupt merchants and intriguing adventurers, who proposed to efface the memory of the Sicilian Vespers by a general massacre of the Mussulmans of Constantinople. But neither of those causes, alone or together, satisfactorily explains it. With wiser insight Mr. Finlay says: "The fulness of time had arrived; the corruption and servility of the Greek race, which had retained it in a degraded condition from the time of its conquest by the Romans, had been expiated by ages of suffering under the Othoman yoke; and the Greeks felt prepared to climb the rugged paths of virtue and self-sacrifice." The number of the Greeks in the East has always been small compared with other nationalities, but it is not by quantity, if we may so say, but quality, that a nation obtains its influence, and exerts its power. The superiority of the Greeks in European Turkey was both ecclesiastical, intellectual, and commercial. They had diffused the orthodox faith throughout the largest part of its population; they had established schools in every considerable city in the East; their enterprising commerce kept them in constant contact with the freer and more active mind of the West; they were the only channels through which the ideas of Western Europe could be brought to the apprehension of the Eastern world. To the fatality and lethargy of the Turk they opposed the intensity of Christian conviction, and the activity and elasticity of the Christian civilization. As of old, they had a passion for knowledge; and toward the close of the last century they exhibited so general and rapid a revival of mental activity, as to excite the attention of reflecting men in the West. In commenting upon the subject before the Academy of Sciences at Munich, in 1812, Professor Thiersch insisted that a revolution was inevitable.

The difference of civilization has undoubtedly made us unjust in many respects to the Turk; Mr. Finlay has done a service to the truth in setting forth more clearly the original relation between the Greek and the Turk. There is a dis

tinction to be made also between the Turk and the Othoman. The Othoman rulers have often exhibited as much severity toward their Mussulman as toward their Christian subjects. The Greek was more likely to obtain justice from his bishop than the Mussulman from the cadi. Nor did the Othoman Sultan ever manifest toward the Greek heretics of his dominions that spirit of relentless hate which the Christian Emperors of the West formulized into a Holy Inquisition. The Turk had a vast and discordant empire to rule; in every province there was a different nationality. Despising all strange religions, he tolerated all. And if his system of administration had not been in so many respects like the Roman, he would not be, perhaps, to-day in that state of impoverishment and decay which made the Roman empire the easy prey of the first invader. The progress of civilization in the West has been to make religion a matter of individual taste. In the East, it is the preserving element of nationalities. When the Greeks lost to a great degree what may be called their European consciousness, the Oriental element in their character became predominant; language gave place to religion as the test of nationality. He who belonged to the Greek Church, whether Albanian or Bulgarian, was both a Greek and a brother. The Greek ecclesiastics, wily and ambitious, have not neglected to avail themselves of this confusion, which they have done their best to increase, between nationality and orthodoxy. They dream of a restored Byzantium, and of a new empire of the Orthodox; and all political means are holy to an ecclesiastical end. But this delusion will come to an end. The latent antagonism between the Greek and all other nationalities in the East is gradually developing. His European character is asserting itself.

The great strength of the Greeks in the war of independence was to be found in the ancient seats of their race. Yet it is a curious fact, that a great deal of the fighting was done, not by Greeks, but by Albanians, by the hardy warriors of Suli and the fearless sailors of Hydra. In that unhappy struggle in which Marco Botzares lost his life, a sacrifice to the envy of the Greeks, neither Greeks nor Turks had any part. It took place between two tribes of Albanians,

the orthodox Tosks, led by the Suliote Botzares, and the Catholic Gueghs. The Albanians, indeed, played an important part through the whole of the revolution. The descendants, it is now generally admitted, of the ancient Illyrians, who from the earliest ages have peopled the northern portions of Continental Greece, a turbulent mountain race, eager to plunder, and ready to apostatize, they have long furnished some of the best soldiers in the Othoman armies. They inhabit to-day as much as one fifth part of modern Greece, and their dress has been adopted, with a slight modification, as the national dress of the Greeks; even in Athens you may still hear their language among the children playing near the temple of Theseus or under the arch of Hadrian. In ancient times they were always regarded as inferior to the Greeks, and they have done little in modern times to redeem their reputation. It has been the fashion to invest the Klephts and the Suliotes with a certain romantic character, but that disappears under Mr. Finlay's critical examination. The former turn out to be only highwaymen and sheep-stealers, and the latter needy depredators upon occasion. Yet the very sadness of the Suliotes' story will never cease to fascinate us. Their home was a wild mountain district overlooking the black waters of the Acheron, at the mouth of which the ancients fancied that they had found the easiest entrance to the other world, so deadly was the malaria there; relying upon the inaccessibility of their fastnesses and their native hardihood, they could long defy the utmost efforts of Ali Pasha to reduce them; but their strength gave out at last, and they capitulated, all except the priest Samuel, who had been their leader. He refused to surrender to a man whom no oath could bind, and, retiring into the powdermagazine with a lighted match, perished in the explosion; while the women, finding Ali faithless to his promises, flung their children from the cliffs, and then jumped over the precipice after them, preferring death to captivity and dishonor. For sixteen years the Suliotes wandered in exile; recalled at length to aid the Turks in putting down the rebellion of Ali, they made a secret treaty with him by which they regained possession of their old home; but again unable to

cope with the armies which the terror of their name drew upon them, they were compelled to withdraw; yet not till they had made their name and their memory a part of the history of the Greeks forever.

The character of Sultan Mahmud, as drawn by Mr. Finlay, is a striking instance of his power and his impartiality. It is difficult for a European to treat a Turk fairly, difficult to overcome his latent conviction that, by the mere force of the term, a Turk is at once a savage and a despot. Sultan Mahmud was both, but both on principle. There was a certain grandeur in his cruelty, something almost to be respected in his intense, if remorseless, striving to arrest the decline and renew the strength of his ancient empire. The contumacy of Pashas and the disobedience of provinces were undermining that system of centralization by which it had been built up, and so long held together. Calm, unfathomable, fanatic, his great purpose, long matured, at last revealed itself. To break down all privileges, and to annihilate all authority which stood between him and his subjects, was a vast and dangerous scheme, it accorded fitly with his imperious and audacious character. The terrible energy of fatalism was in all he did. To slay the Janissaries and to exterminate the Greeks were equally parts of the holy work which he was enthroned upon the Bosphorus to do. The mystery of such a character is beyond the common judgment of men. Sylla and Sultan Mahmud II. may have been great monsters, but it was by system, and for an object, sacred, irresistible. To what degree the latter succeeded it is not time yet to judge. He began the work of reform, and that work seems to be still going on, if fitfully. But whether the Turkish empire is to be reformed, or swept away, is one of those inscrutable problems which baffle alike curiosity and speculation. If the Turk be assailed as barbarous, it cannot be claimed for the Greek that he is wholly civilized. The one or the other is to give way; but whether a reformed Paleologus or a civilized Othoman is to sit on the throne of Constantine, is known only to Him in whose keeping are the destinies of nations and the hearts of

men.

The Greek war of independence was of a desperate and san