NARRATIVE OF THE AFFAIRS OF GREECE. "La Russie ne sera jamais tranquille jusqu'à ce qu'elle ait établi un état Grec sur les débris de la Turquie. Il sera donc facile à la France de détacher l'Angleterre de la Russie.” MONITEUR, 1800. WE should be inclined to consider the Greek Revolution as one which, in its immediate explosion, was determined much more by literary than by political causes. The revival of the ancient Greek language, and the circumstance of the Modern Greeks being identified, through it, with that genius and history which have so deeply affected the character of European nations, told upon the dispositions of the Greek people in a manner truly wonderful. The language was their own, or nearly so; the theatre of the events of the classic ages was the country around them; the names were the same. But these associations, powerful in their direct effect, were rendered infinitely more so by their reverberation, as it were, from Europe. How galling must not have been to them a foreign and a so-termed barbarous yoke, when they found their country enshrined in the classical devotion of the greatest nations of Europe, and when the names with which their infants were baptized were the models of virtue, genius, and heroism, which England, France, and Ger many taught their children to imitate and revere ! It was a grave error to suppose that Greece was suffering under intolerable despotism prior to the revolution. This error it is which has led to misconception of all the phases through which Greece has passed, and this error we are anxious to expose in the outset of our narrative. We will not inquire what particular meaning is to be given to the words despotism and oppression, but we appeal to the circumstances in which Greece stood previous to the revolution, and we leave it to our readers themselves to bestow the appropriate epithets. In 1756, a dreadful plague swept off one half of the population of Greece. Fourteen years afterwards, the fatal Russian expedition to the Morea subjected that devoted country to ten years of unceasing devastation and bloodshed. On the restoration of tranquillity, the population of the Morea was estimated at 190,000 souls. In 1781, a plague swept off a considerable portion of the inhabitants of that and the neighbouring countries. In 1810, the population was estimated at 340,000; in 1820, at 458,000, exclusive of 42,000 Mussulmans, thus nearly doubling in thirty years. In 1790, the first decked Greek vessel was built. In 1820, the Greeks were possessed of 600 brigs and corvettes, which, when armed for war, mounted 6000 guns. In 1780, when the insurrection provoked by Russia had entirely subsided, Albanian hordes had swept over the Peninsula, occupied many of its most fertile districts, and effectually crushed every hope, or repressed every energy, among the Greek people. Their prescriptive rights, their national institutions, were swept away; the characters of their national administration were wholly obliterated; the immunities of their church were abolished; and, had the Supreme Turkish Government been any European Government, they would have been abolished for ever. After such provocations, such revolts, such complete subjection, no government with European notions of administration could ever have suffered that people again to organize the means of self-government and of independent action. In 1820, the municipal organization of Greece existed upon every spot of its soil. A central municipal council, representing the municipalities of the whole country, was placed, if not as a censor, at least as an assessor, beside the delegated authority of the Sultan. Its intromission was legally requisite in the internal administration of the province, which had not only the means of appeal at Constantinople, but a regular delegation there, as representing the interests of the province at the capital. The laws of Justinian were at the same time the code of Greece, and, although there were no native courts of justice legally established among the Greek people, they possessed the means of ready and instantaneous justice, at each man's door, in the decision of the municipal elders, from which appeal might be made to the Greek bishop, as expounder of the Pandects, when the question involved was of sufficient importance, the authority of the Turkish court being given to that decision. Besides these means of judicature, another lay in an organic statute of the Porte, that the decision of an arbitrator chosen by mutual consent is final judgment; and again, that the decision of a village, as regards its own affairs, has the force of law. The progress of the Greeks, indicated in these few remarks, in population, navigation, government, and judicature, in the interval of thirty years that occurred between the conclusion of one calamitous insurrection and the commencement of the revolution, is, we cannot help thinking, unparalleled in the history of man; and is, notwithstanding appearances to the contrary, or countervailing realities, a triumphant proof of superior excellence in the character and dispositions of the Greek people, and in the principles of the Turkish administration. It is a proof that the institutions of Turkey were not ill adapted to progress and prosperity, even while subject to the abuses of the Janissary system, which were sufficient to excite the revolution, and which, but for European ideas and interference, the revolution would have contented itself with removing. It is sufficient to prove, in spite of the disastrous predicament in which Greece has been placed ever since she has been subject to European influence, that, in herself, in the energy of her mind, and the advantages of her position, resources truly wonderful did exist, |