Mosaics of Grecian History Part 53

The Battle of Nava'rino.

Hearts of Oak, that have bravely delivered the brave, And uplifted old Greece from the brink of the grave!

'Twas the helpless to help, and the hopeless to save, That your thunderbolts swept o'er the brine; And as long as yon sun shall look down on the wave The light of your glory shall shine.

For the guerdon ye sought with your bloodshed and toil, Was it slaves, or dominion, or rapine, or spoil?

No! your lofty emprise was to fetter and foil The uprooter of Greece's domain, When he tore the last remnant of food from her soil, Till her famished sank pale as the slain!

Yet, Navar'no's heroes! does Christendom breed The base hearts that will question the fame of your deed?

Are they men?--let ineffable scorn be their meed, And oblivion shadow their graves!

Are they women?--to Turkish serails let them speed, And be mothers of Mussulmen slaves!

Abettors of ma.s.sacre! dare ye deplore That the death-shriek is silenced on h.e.l.las' sh.o.r.e?

That the mother aghast sees her offspring no more By the hand of Infanticide grasped?

And that stretched on yon billows distained by their gore Missolonghi's a.s.sa.s.sins have gasped?

Prouder scene never hallowed war's pomp to the mind Than when Christendom's pennons wooed social the wind, And the flower of her brave for the combat combined-- Their watchword, humanity's vow: Not a sea-boy that fought in that cause but mankind Owes a garland to bon or his brow!

No grudge, by our side, that to conquer or fall Came the hardy, rude Russ, and the high-mettled Gaul: For whose was the genius that planned, at its call, When the whirlwind of battle should roll?

All were brave! but the star of success over all Was the light of our Codrington's soul.

That star of thy day-spring, regenerate Greek!

Dimmed the Saracen's moon, and struck pallid his cheek: In its fast flushing morning thy Muses shall speak, When their love and their lutes they reclaim; And the first of their songs from Parna.s.sus's peak Shall be "Glory to Codrington's name!"

The result of the conflict at Navarino so enraged the Turks that they stopped all communication with the allied powers, and prepared for war. In the following year (1828) France and England sent an army to the Morea: Russia declared war for violations of treaties, and depredations upon her commerce; and on the 7th of May a Russian army of one hundred and fifteen thousand men, under Count Witt'genstein, crossed the Pruth, and by the 2d of July had taken seven fortresses from the Turks. In August a convention was concluded with Ibrahim Pasha, who agreed to evacuate the Morea, and set his Greek prisoners at liberty. In the mean time the Greeks continued the war, drove the Turks from the country north of the Corinthian Gulf, and fitted out numerous privateers to prey upon the commerce of their enemy. In January, 1829, the Sultan received a protocol from the three allied powers, declaring that they took the Morea and the Cyc'lades under their protection, and that the entry of any military force into Greece would be regarded as an attack upon themselves. The danger of open war with France and England, as well as the successes and alarming advances of the Russians, now commanded by Marshal Die'bitsch, who had meantime taken Adrianople, within one hundred and thirty miles of the Turkish capital, induced the Sultan to listen to overtures of peace; and on the 14th of September "the peace of Adrianople" was signed by Turkey and Russia, by which the former recognized the independence of Greece.

VI. GREECE UNDER A CONSt.i.tUTIONAL MONARCHY.

Though freed from her Turkish oppressors, Greece was severely agitated by domestic discontents, jealousies, and even manifest turbulence. Count Ca'po d'Is'tria, a Greek in the service of Russia, who had been chosen, in 1828, president of the provisional government, aroused suspicions that he designed to establish a despotism in his own person, and he was a.s.sa.s.sinated in 1831.

A period of anarchy followed. The great powers had previously determined to erect Greece into a monarchy, and had first offered the crown to Prince Leopold, afterward King of Belgium, who, having accepted the offer, soon after declined it on account of the unwillingness of the Greeks to receive him, and their dissatisfaction with the territorial boundaries prescribed for them. Finally, the boundaries of the kingdom having been more satisfactorily determined by a treaty between Turkey and the powers in 1832, the crown was conferred on Otho, a Bavarian prince, who arrived at Nauplia, the then capital of Greece, in 1833. Athens became the seat of government in 1835. Says a writer in the British Quarterly, "The Greeks neither elected their own sovereign nor chose their national polity. In a spirit of generous confidence they allowed the three protecting powers to name a king for them, and the powers rewarded them by making the worst selection they could. They gave the Greeks a boy of seventeen, with neither a character to form nor an intellect to develop."

The treaty by which Otho was placed on the throne made no provision for a const.i.tution, but one was expected; and, after ten years of oppressive subjection by the king and his Bavarian minions, both the people and a revolted soldiery surrounded the palace, and demanded a const.i.tution. The king acquiesced, a national a.s.sembly was held, and a const.i.tution was framed which received the king's approval in March, 1844. In this bloodless revolution we have an instance both of the determination, and peaceable, orderly, and well-disposed tendencies of the Greek people. An eye-witness of the scene has thus described it:

"I well recollect the uprising of 1843. Exasperated by the miserable rule of Otho, a plot was hatched to wrench a const.i.tution from him, and when everything was ripe the Athenians arose. At midnight the hoofs of horses were heard clanging on the pavements, and the flash of torches gleamed in the streets, as the populace and military hurried toward the palace; and when the amber-colored dawn lighted the Acropolis and the plain of Athens, the king found himself surrounded by his happy subjects, and discovered two field-pieces pointing into the entrance of the royal residence.

A const.i.tution was demanded in firm but respectful terms--it being suggested at the same time that, if the request were not granted by four o'clock in the afternoon, fire would be opened on the palace. In the mean while all Athens was gathered in the open s.p.a.ce around the palace, chatting, cracking jokes, taking snuff, and smoking, as if they had a.s.sembled to witness a show or hear the reading of a will. Not a shot was fired; no violence was offered or received; and precisely as the limiting hour arrived, the obstinate king succ.u.mbed to his besiegers, and the mult.i.tude quietly dispersed to their homes." [Footnote: B. G. W.

Benjamin, in "The Turk and the Greek."]

The Const.i.tution which the Greeks secured contained no real guarantee for the legislative rights of the people, and the minor benefits it gave them were ignored by the government. A continuance of the severe contests between the national party and foreign intriguers materially interfered with the prosperity of the country. Other events, also, now occurred to disturb it. In 1847 a diplomatic difficulty with Turkey, and, in 1848, a difference with England, that arose from various claims of English subjects, and that continued for several years, a.s.sumed threatening proportions, and were only terminated by the submission of Greece to the demands made upon her. When the Crimean war broke out, Greece took a decided stand in favor of Russia; but England and France soon compelled her to a.s.sume and maintain a strictly neutral position. In 1859 the residents of the Ionian Islands, which were under the protectorate of England, sought annexation to Greece, and manifested their intentions in great popular demonstrations, and even insurrections; but Greece, though sympathizing with them, was too feeble to aid them, and no change was then made in their relations.

THE DEPOSITION OF KING OTHO.

While these events were transpiring, the feeling of hostility toward King Otho and the royal family was taking deeper root with the Greek people, and open demonstrations of violence were frequently made. The king promised more liberal measures of government; but these fell short of the popular demand, and the Greeks resolved to dethrone the dynasty. In October, 1862, after several violent demonstrations elsewhere, matters culminated in a successful revolution at Athens. A provisional government was established by the leaders of the popular party, who decreed the deposition of the king. Otho, who was absent from Athens at the time, on a visit to Napoli, finding himself without a throne did not return to Athens, but issued a proclamation taking leave of Greece, and sailed for Germany in an English frigate.

He had occupied the throne just thirty years. MR. TUCKERMAN thus describes him: "An honest-hearted man, but without intellectual strength, dressed in the Greek fustinella, he endeavored to be Greek in spirit; but under his braided jacket his heart beat to foreign measures, and his ear inclined to foreign counsels. But for the quicker-witted Amelia, the queen, his follies would have worn out the patience of the people sooner than they did." The condition of Greece under his government is thus described by the writer in the British Quarterly, who wrote immediately after the coup d'etat: "To outward appearance, the Greece which the Philhel'lenists of the days of Canning declared to be re-animated and restored, has presented, during thirty years of settled government, the aspect of a country corrupt, intriguing, venal, and poor. The government has kept faith neither with its subjects nor with its creditors; it has endeavored, by all means in its power, to crush the const.i.tutional liberties of its subjects; and by refusing, throughout this period, to pay a single drachma of its public debt, it has stamped itself either hopelessly bankrupt or scandalously fraudulent. The people, meanwhile, crushed by the incubus of a dishonest and extravagant foreign rule, remain in nearly the situation they held on the first establishment of their kingdom. In a word, Greece was thirty years ago transferred from one despotism to another. The Bavarian rule was no appreciable mitigation of the Turkish rule. If the Christian monarch hated his h.e.l.lenic subjects less than the Mussulman monarch, he was still more ignorant of the conditions of prosperous government."

THE ACCESSION OF KING GEORGE.

If it has ever had an existence, Greek independence may be properly dated from the deposition of the Bavarian dynasty. In December, 1862, a committee appointed by the provisional government ordered the election of a new king. The national a.s.sembly shortly after met at Athens, and, having first confirmed the deposition of Otho, of those proposed as candidates for the vacant throne by the European powers, Prince Alfred of England was elected by an immense majority on the first ballot. This choice of a scion of the freest and most stable of the const.i.tutional monarchies of Europe, was an expression of the desire and the resolve of the Greek people to secure as full political and civil liberties as was possible for them under a monarchical government. But Prince Alfred was held ineligible in consequence of a clause in the protocol of the protecting powers, which declared that the government of Greece should not be confided to a prince chosen from the reigning families of those states. Thereupon, in March, 1863, Prince George of Denmark, the present king, was unanimously elected by the a.s.sembly, and his election was confirmed by the great powers in the following July. There is every reason to suppose that England a.s.sumed the honor of choosing Prince George.

On the withdrawal of Prince Alfred she expressed her willingness to abandon her protectorate of the Ionian Islands, and cede them to Greece, provided a king were chosen to whom the English government could not object. The Ionian Islands were ceded to Greece within two months after the accession of King George; and Mr. Tuckerman relates that, "when Prince Christian, King of Denmark, was in London, attending the marriage of his daughter to the Prince of Wales, Lord John Russell discovered the second son of Prince Christian in the uniform of a midshipman, and suggested his name as the successor of Otho."

King George took the const.i.tutional oath in October, 1863. In 1866 the revolution in Crete, or Candia, broke out, and, owing to Greek sympathy with the insurrectionists, thousands of whom found an asylum in Greece, grave complications arose between Greece and Turkey, which were only settled by a conference of the great powers in 1869. By the treaty with the Porte in 1832 the boundary line of Greece had been settled in an arbitrary manner, by running it from the Gulf of Volo along the chain of the Othrys Mountains to the Gulf of Arta--by which Greece was deprived of the high fertile plains of Thessaly and Epirus, the largest and richest of cla.s.sical Greece. At the close of the late Russian-Turkish war, however, the boundary line was changed by the powers so as to include within the kingdom a large portion of those ancient possessions; but this change occasioned serious conflicts between the government and the people of the annexed districts, and difficulties also arose with Turkey in consequence.

But these were finally settled by an amendment to the treaty, pa.s.sed in 1881."

With the exceptions just noted, no important events have disturbed the peace of Greece since the accession of King George. In him the country has a ruler of capacity, who is in great measure his own adviser, and who comprehends the chief wish of his subjects, "that Greece shall govern Greece." As MR. TUCKERMAN has said of him, "Unlike his predecessor, he is a Greek by sympathy of language and ideas. He feels the popular pulse and tries to keep time with it, not more as a matter of policy than from national sympathy; and his hands are comparatively free of the impediment of those foreign ministerial counselors who, each struggling for supremacy, united only in checking the political advancement of the kingdom." It was no fault of the Greek people that, under King Otho, Greece failed to make the internal advancement that was expected of her on her escape from Moslem tyranny. It was the fault of the government; for, when a better government came, there was a corresponding change in the inner life of the people; and at the present time, with the freest of const.i.tutional monarchies, and under the guidance of a ruler so sympathetic, competent, and popular, redeemed Greece is making rapid strides in intellectual and material progress. Of this progress we have the following account by a prominent American divine, a recent visitor to that country:

Progress in Modern Greece. [Footnote: Rev. Joseph Cook, in the New York Independent, February, 1883.]

"You lean over the parapet of the Acropolis, on the side toward the modern city, and look in vain for the print of that Venetian leprous scandal and that Turkish hoof which for six hundred years trod Greece into the slime. In the long bondage to the barbarian, the h.e.l.lenic spirit was weakened, but not broken. The Greek, with his fine texture, loathes the stolid, opaque temperament of the polygamistic Turk. Intermarriages between the races are very few. The Greek race is not extinct. In many rural populations in Greece the modern h.e.l.lenic blood is as pure as the ancient.

Only h.e.l.lenic blood explains h.e.l.lenic countenances, yet easily found; the h.e.l.lenic language, yet wonderfully incorrupt; and the h.e.l.lenic spirit, omnipresent in liberated Greece. Fifty years ago not a book could be bought at Athens. To-day one in eighteen of the whole population of Greece is in school. In 1881 thirteen very tall factory chimney-stacks could be counted in the Pirae'us, not one of which was there in 1873. It is pathetic to find Greece at last opening, on the Acropolis and in the heart of Athens, national museums for the sacred remnants of her own ancient art, which have been pillaged hitherto for the enrichment of the museums of all Western Europe. During sixty years of independence the h.e.l.lenic spirit has doubled the population of Greece, increased her revenues five hundred per cent., extended telegraphic communication over the kingdom, enlarged the fleet from four hundred and forty to five thousand vessels, opened eight ports, founded eleven new cities, restored forty ruined towns, changed Athens from a hamlet of hovels to a city of seventy thousand inhabitants, and planted there a royal palace, a legislative chamber, ten type-foundries, forty printing establishments, twenty newspapers, an astronomical observatory, and a university with eighty professors and fifteen hundred students. After little more than half a century of independence, the h.e.l.lenic spirit devotes a larger percentage of public revenue to purposes of instruction than France, Italy, England, Germany, or even the United States. Modern Greece, sixty years ago a slave and a beggar, to-day, by the confession of the most merciless statisticians, stands at the head of the list of self-educated nations."

THE END.