“Double, double, toil and trouble;Fire burn, and cauldron bubble!”
“Double, double, toil and trouble;Fire burn, and cauldron bubble!”
“Double, double, toil and trouble;Fire burn, and cauldron bubble!”
“Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble!”
In conclusion, we need hardly say that we cannot agree with Sir A. Alison when he states, so strongly as he does in the last paragraph, that “already the warmest hopes of the friends of Greece have been realised; and all the signs of advancing prosperity are to be seen in the land.” It is a great mistake to imagine that the country is really in a prosperous state because Athens has trebled its population in thirty years. Athens has a well-furnished and rather a flourishing appearance, for the same reason that Nauplia looks out upon the beautiful Bay of Argos in such a state of woeful dismantlement and dilapidation: the court has left the Argive city, and travelled to the Attic; and all the gilded gingerbread, which you call prosperity, has gone with it. Let no man be hasty to draw sanguine promises of Greek prosperity from anything good or glittering that may delight his eyes in the streets of Athens. That splendid palace of the little German prince, now called King of Greece, with its fine well-watered gardens without, and its fine pictures within, and its large dancing-saloon, the wonder even of London beauties—this palace was a mere toy of the boy’s poetical papa, and has no more to do with the progress of real prosperity in Greece than a wax-doll has to do with life and organisation. Nay, it may be most certainly affirmed, that not a small part of that sudden growth of the capital of Greece is, with reference to the country at large, a positive evil, a brilliant excrescence, which owes its existence altogether to the artificial attraction of the nutritive fluids of the body politic to one prominent point, while the largest and most useful limbs are left without their natural supply. If there are shining white palaces, and green Venetian blinds, in one Greek city, there is desolation and dreariness, stagnation and every sort of barbarism, in the fields. But “commerce flourishes;” it has doubled, says Sir A. Alison, since the battle of Navarino. Be it so. Patras is a goodly city, preferable, in some points, to Athens, we think; but were there not rich merchants at Hydra before the Revolution? and are the Greeks at Patras more prosperous than at Salonica, at Odessa, at Trieste, at Leghorn, at Manchester? There were always clever merchants among the Greeks, just as generally as there are sharp bankers and money-changers among Jews and Armenians. We would by no means despair of Young Greece; there is much to admire in her, especially her schools, university, and the wonderful culture of her deathless language in its most recent shape; and only in a fit of foolish pettishness would any Englishman entertain the thought of blotting her again out of the map of nations, for any of the many sins she has committed, whether by her own fault, or—what we suspect to be the real truth—by the ignorant and officious agency of German bureaucratists, Anglo-French constitutionalists, and Muscovite diplomatists. Nevertheless, in so slippery a science as politics, and with creatures so difficult to manage as human beings, it is always better to avoid the temptation of drawing panoramic pictures in rose colour; and with regard to Greece, a country to which humanity owes so much, our first duty, in the present very critical state of Europe, is to look soberly at a reality full of perilous problems, and to possess our souls in patience.