only think what have been the consequences of a war, that precipitated into death and oblivion the better part of two generations, through nearly the whole of Europe. It has reduced to poverty ten millions of ourselves: it has consigned to slavery sixty millions, partly of our neighbours, partly of our allies it has enabled the French ministers to recall the Jesuits, the Spanish to restore the Inquisition, the English to appoint their colleagues and successors: it has abolished republics and republicanism: it has cast the dregs of democracy on and over the loftiest thrones, constitutional and monarchal: it has multiplied and widened the cracks and crevices of the church it has sustained and sanctified the mosk: it has proscribed the traffic of those who dealt in Africans: it has legitimated the practices of such as carry off the Greeks: indulgent to the gambler, generous to the robber, honorific to the poisoner and assassin, indifferent to the improver of his country, inimical to the enlightener, and rancorous to the defender. Do I think it little, you may ask me, to have abolished the slave-trade? Do I speak heedlessly of the blacks? No. Much would it have been if this accursed trade were really abolished: if we had united with America to treat as pirates all concerned in it, French or Portuguese. We withdraw from the redress of wrongs, we enforce no stipulation of treaties, we act dastardly with every despot, and perfidiously with every people. Nothing can suffer from aggression without paining me when I know it: but other nations do not interest me like the Greeks, to whom I owe every exalted, every generous, every just sentiment. I never can be induced to imagine, that the extinction of all the tribes in Africa, and all in Asia, with half of the dwellers in Europe, would be so lamentable as the destruction of Missolonghi, or even as the death of Bozzaris. Animal life in itself is little animal life, however, is nearly all that belongs to the greater part of mankind, unless some glorious recollection, some mighty aim and intent, shall raise them above the level of trodden and trite humanity. No such feeling can belong to the generality of nations. England and Sweden, always contending against greater numbers, and almost always signally victorious, may be justly proud of military glory; Italy of the arts: but which of them in either has outrivalled Greece? Her old heroic age was less heroic than the present: grant her another, and your children may see a Phidias and a Sophocles. Should I have wronged our ministers in doubting their sincerity, and in underrating their exertions to suppress the slave-trade, let me retract or soften the expression: let me say, if truth will bear it, we are zealous in protecting from slavery the remotest nations of Africa, who have always for thousands of years been subject to that visitation, and who never have expected, or even heard tidings of, our generous interference. We take them away by righteous force from under the proudest flag; we convey them to our own settle ments; we give them food, clothing, ground, instruction, morals, religion. Humanity cries out, "O tell them they are men!" and we hear her. Is she silent for the Greeks? have their voices no echo in her breast? do we treat them cruelly be cause they have not the advantage of being barbarous? do we spurn them because they cling to us? is it because they trust only in us, that we reject and repulse them, them only of all mankind? Odysseus. The ships of Ismael Bey repass the Mediterranean and Archipelago, laden with the sons and daughters of a half-extinguished race; half-extinguished under our eyes. Their terrors are not at death; their tears are not for captivity; their loss, though their country is Greece, is not of country. God alone can avenge it: God alone must hear it. Something may surely be done to alleviate the sufferings of the few survivors, wan- | dering among naked rocks, or lifting up their heads from the rushes in the pestilential marsh They require of you no land to cultivate, no sustenance, no raiment: they implore of you permission to live under the safeguard of laws, and to partake with the most ignorant and ferocious tribes, with murderers and cannibals, a spare moment of your attention and concern. Surely, surely this is not too much; if you consider that the finest eloquence ever heard in your Parliament was admirable only in proportion as it resembled the eloquence of our ancestors; and that gods were bowed down to and worshipped. by the wisest and most powerful nations, for being in form and dignity like them. His Imperial Majesty was taught from his youth upward to contemplate the glories of antiquity, nearly all of which are crowded in one people; has he never felt that there is something more and better than ambition? Has he never thought that he may now enjoy by uniting, as his people calls upon him to do, the scattered members of the Greek nation and the Greek church? If not, yet no king or emperor on earth has the right or the power to hinder your co-operation with us; no people has the wish; excepting that which at this | instant is leading thousands into slavery, thousands of women and children, from famished cities, from the cinders of villages, from defiled altars; thousands who cry in the agony of despair, "O God! is there none to save us!" No monarch could ever by any exertion render so great a service to humanity as the emperor can without an effort. The effervescence and discontent of his subjects would subside at one word. And what word? Not enslave, not depopulate, not conquer: but a voice that would be heard with transport from every quarter of the world: a voice indeed of glad tidings: "Save! save!" It depends on his determination, which nothing in the universe should set aside or shake or alter or delay, whether he will be the most glorious, the most potent, the most beloved, the most secure of princes, or whether he will pass his anxious days among suspicions and murmurs and seditions and treasons; whether he will suffer those who have | head? upon what parental breast can hers repose, prayed with him and for him, to bend under lust O blessed avenger of insulted Freedom? And thou, and cruelty, to be driven from their country, to expire in tortures, and to leave a progeny, not of Greeks in religion, name, or habitation, to fight in future wars against him, and to burn the remainder of the churches to which their mothers bore them as the last refuge. Let one voice more inform him then, the voice of England, that any prince in Europe would be abandoned by his subjects, military and civil, who should venture to draw the sword against him, while his is protecting Greece. If the appeal be ineffectual, let us believe that Providence will bring about by means of folly and perversity, what wisdom and rectitude were not permitted to accomplish. Quiroga! where is the region of thy wanderings? Must thou ponder and pore over the vestiges of gratitude in lands across the Atlantic? Shall not Spaniards bear toward thee eternally the love and veneration that the rudest once of Columbian tribes bear still toward their father Vasco ?* In the islet of Pascuaro rest his bones; art thou among those who weep over them? Envying his repose, art thou doubtful of participating his glory? Such are the first names for children to gather up, the last for men to drop into oblivion. Despots are now the revolutionists, and the learned and liberal are become more than ever their aversion and scorn. The present race of princes, throughout the continent of Europe, are the most ignorant and gross barbarians that have appeared contemporaneously since the revival of letters. Odysseus. Nevertheless the autocrat of Russia, if he continued to be master of the Ionian Islands, would from policy found a college in them, at which the youth of Greece should receive on easy terms the instruction necessary for the learned At present they study chiefly at Pisa, and are under no obligation to any power that can protect them. The French are solicitous to draw them to Paris; with what intentions we may easily conceive. Nearly all of them are favourable to France, and averse to England: a bias which might have been reversed. Trelawny. The world is shaken off its axis, and the highest nations are gasping for existence, crushed by the superincumbence of the lowest. If the sufferings of others are any alleviation to yours, turn toward them. Undoubtedly Greece hath suffered much, Odysseus! but sufferings are never extreme while there remains a consciousness of power to resist. Spain has lost it. Every man in Spain who has laid before his fellow-professions. citizens the riper and richer fruits of education, every man who has made a sacrifice to the public good, is marked out for priestly and for royal vengeance. Fewer families in the same period were reduced to misery in France by the tyranny of Robespierre, than in Spain by the aggression of Louis. Restoring his relative to despotic power, he might at least have stipulated against his inordinate and wanton love of bloodshed, and have placed some barrier, some boundary, some imaginary line at least and visible horizon, to the insensate fury of his bigotry and revenge. It is known that upward of one hundred and seventy thousand persons have been imprisoned, driven from their houses, placed under the power of the police, or deprived of their occupations and livelihood, since the departure of Ferdinand from Cadiz. So much of wretchedness hath never been occasioned by any one man within so short a time, to so many of the brave, the industrious, and the virtuous. The nineteenth century is now thrown back upon the sixteenth. Odysseus. By the help of England! Trelawny. Where there is the same oppression, there will be the same resistance: where there is the same cruelty, there will be exerted the same energy to extinguish it. Deplorable! that Virtue must assume the attitude of Despair; that bad actions must remove bad men; that Justice must use in her defence the weapon she hath wrested from the criminal. Odysseus. Shall Spain abjure her first friends? her earliest defenders? Never be it said of her: never may she lose our sympathies. Trelawny. But where art thou, Riego! abandoning, to preserve the honour of thy country, the most beloved and tender of women, in the first hour of union. Upon what mountain crag rests thy devoted Trelawny. We fancy that everything is to be done by money and force; and we use no other means. Much indeed may be effected by them : but the same means must continue in exercise, or the effect ceases: while means less expensive are equally efficacious and more durable. On my way hither I visited the Ionian University, projected, founded, and principally endowed, by the most public-spirited and the most literary of our nobility. He was unseconded by the ministry, and thwarted by the governor of the islands. His lodgings were less habitable than would be furnished to a journeyman tailor for eighteen pence a week, at the worst alehouse of any country town in England. I will venture to assert that every county jail furnishes a fraudulent debtor with more convenient accommodation than the English ministry, in the prodigality of its grants, allowed to the Chancellor of the Ionian University. And this was not the treatment of a single year; although a single one occupies no undefinable or scanty space in a life too far on its wane, a life of energy and of study. At the same time enormous sums were voted for the barracks and government-house. So preferable are guards to friends! so greatly more important and necessary are soldiers than citizens, force than humanity, subjection than improvement ! Do not hope for any aid or intervention from the ministers of kings. They abandon you from * Vasco de Quiroga, first bishop of Michuacan, was justly called so. the first moment they sit comfortably in their | After a war undertaken not for power but prin places. Chateaubriand, who wrote The Spirit of Christianity, and chatters about freedom, no sooner was admitted to office, than he demanded the punishment of death on the publishers of sedition by which term all ministers mean the exposure of their abuses or their incapacity. When people suffer most they complain loudest; and the same hand that has made them suffer most, will punish most severely their complaints. The clearer the truth is, the more partisans will it collect; and the more partisans it collects, the more dangerous must it be to the proprietors of power. Chateaubriand will never be seditious against any exercise of tyranny but that which excludes him from the participation of it; and although he may go far enough to get whipped, he will lift up one ear and scurry off when the bloodhound takes the turn of the beagle. He throws into his Spirit of Christianity the spirits he secreted from the hall of the jacobins: they were too strong for the baptisers at Nantes and the regenerators at Lyons. ciples, so we are told it was, no sooner are the Spaniards become an independent and free people, than the envoy of the King of England aids the King of Spain to break his oath with them; and they look down together from the royal palace, with equal complacency, on the murder and banishment of how much better men. With! Bonaparte, when every government and every chance was against us, we contended year after year, that the power of the French might not prevail in Spain. Yet the laws and institutions they introduced were calculated to reform and civilise a generous and aspiring, but a degraded and ferocious people. We destroy the usurpation of Napoleon; we restore a Bourbon; we promise a free constitution. Everything is in our power: what is it we do? We allow a beaten enemy to supplant us: we allow a Bourbon to exert an anthority which a Bonaparte did not arrogate or attempt. We give up Spain to France: we give up those who had fought bravely at our sides, to ¦ imprisonment and exile, to tortures and death! Chateaubriand is called the most liberal of the We permit our commerce to be excluded, our French privy councillors, and Canning of the merchants to be pillaged, our capitalists to be deEnglish. Yet, when Chateaubriand was in power, frauded, and our allies, or rather our ally, for we we found the African slave-trade in full vigour have only one left in the universe, to be invaded under his protection, as we find the European by the arms of Spain under the eyes and under under Canning's. Who would have believed that the flag of France. Are the Bourbons then a England should permit the Egyptians to carry on preferable race to the Bonapartes, that we should the slave-trade against Greece, and should remon- be so tolerant, so long-suffering, so supine? Are strate with Portugal and France for carrying on they more honourable, more just, more wise, more theirs against Guinea! There is no earnestness, conciliatory? They reign: we have strapped and no sincerity, no truth whatever, in this remon-cross-barred them in their thrones, and must not strance. We know that our minister must tickle all the humours of his master; and that none was ever readier to do it, with every joint of every finger. If any proof were wanting of the man's duplicity, after his conduct toward Lord Castlereagh, and indeed toward every one with whom he ever acted, we might adduce his countenance of that A'Court who betrayed the Neapolitans, by furthering a secret correspondence between the king and his son, and who was the main instrument in undermining the Spanish constitution. Wherever he is sent or maintained, it is for some such purpose as at Madrid and Naples. Be assured that, if the English government should pretend to espouse your cause, it will be only to relax your efforts, to unman your navy, and to deliver you up to worse servitude than the past. Odysseus. Your minister did revive our hopes by his speeches. Trelawny. He would be an imitator of Chateaubriand; but he has not a tithe of the Frenchman's abilities, as a writer or a politician. The English nation was never so abased in the eyes of Europe, as when this adventurer, for the sake of support from abroad, sat down quietly and silently at his post, and saw the French army pass the Pyrenees. The French were not recently vanquished, were not bound hand and foot in their metropolis, when England in the reign of Louis the Fourteenth made war against them to break a family alliance. ask questions about them: let us ask then a few about the dynasty that is passed. Were the Bonapartes the most slothful, were the Bonapartes the most bigoted, were the Bonapartes the most unprincipled, the most ungrateful of mankind? Were they persecutors, were they per jurers, were they parricidal? Odysseus. Do not wait for an answer from me. I wish we had them again at the head of nations, with less power and more experience. Kings. taught to walk by priests and to ride by plunderers, will wantonly lay waste all the cultivation that lies before them and since there are no others, we will try to keep them out of Greece. where a robber the more or the less is no grave matter. And indeed there is a likelihood of above one the more and above one the worse where this fur is hung out to cover them. We have heard occasionally fine things read to us from newspapers about the person thou hast been describing. Trelawny. Part of our money goes to pay the people who mislead us, and another part to pay those who enable them to do it, by newspapers, reviews, and magazines. Odysseus. Has the sun hurt thy head, Trelawny! Odysseus. I feared it. Thou saidst, "by news papers, reviews, and magazines." What, in the name of God, have military evolutions and stores in common with political writers? Why dost thou laugh, my son? diers and robbers and (what are worse than the one, and no better than the other) merchants. I Trelawny. We never should laugh at a mistake; have lived among those who, although not the and yet it is almost the only thing we do laugh most virtuous of the Turks, are much superior in at. Faith! the reviews and magazines I was gravity and decorousness of deportment to the speaking of, have nearly as little to do with litera- principal men in Russia or Austria, in Italy or ture as with war. They are printed sheets, pre- France. Wary and unconfiding, they behave tending to give an account of new publications: toward all with the winning courtesy of pliant the writers of them are paid to traduce the cha-grandeur. Never does a word escape them within racter and vilify the productions of those who the possibility of offending. To those who by think differently from their employers. They are their services have merited their favour, they are likewise the eulogists of the ministry or the oppo- the most grateful and the most generous of mansition, and are among us what the Albanians are kind. These are their virtues. We already know among you; faithful and trusty while you pay too well their vices; of which in our eyes the most them well, but ready at any hour to go over to grievous and intolerable, is, the desire of holding your enemy, and to be as trusty and faithful to us in subjection. So long as this is unquenched him, if he will pay them better. in them, we are their enemies: but if justice or exhaustion should subdue it, rather would I confide in them as allies and friends than in any other nation under heaven. Odysseus. Ho! these I find are the public criers who extol your minister for his liberality and wisdom. What can we Greeks expect from him! promises, delays, deception, destitution! Trelawny. Let us try whether we can not Trelawny. Let those uphold the cabinet con- bring about, by force of arms, this desirable conspirator who have places or promises or expecta-summation. tions; but let them obtain no more credit for their rectitude, than when they swear to you they believe he expended fourteen thousand pounds at Lisbon, for three months' board and lodging. Odysseus. I do not understand how this can be. Trelawny. Nor does any man. However, the House of Commons, at that time composed in great part of stockjobbers, contractors, commissioners, together with some six-fingered patriots, who have since robbed the poor Greeks through their rags, instituted no inquiry into the impudent and incredible declaration, that, although he had received fourteen thousand pounds of the public money, he had spent somewhat of his own beside. The wonder is, nobody had the spirit to propose that so disinterested a patriot should at least be indemnified by the nation, for the few remaining thousands he had generously disbursed in her service. He accepted the office from Castlereagh, whom he had attempted by clandestine means to prove unworthy of the king's confidence, and Castlereagh was rejoiced to cover him with contempt by acceding to his solicitation. Odysseus. I care little what your public men are doing one against another: but it concerns me nearly if they quail at Russia. I have little respect for the autocrat of Russia; little regard or commiseration for his hordes of slaves; and I confess that I regret none of his conquests, excepting Finland. The others are happier than they were before, and will render more service to freedom and humanity, than they could have done without a temporary subjugation. If Alexander does not succour you, there are two reasons: first, the secret-service-money given by England, France, and Austria, to his mistresses and confidants; secondly, what naturally flows from it, the allurements of pleasure that have lately been thrown into his way by them, in order to counteract the impressions of policy, to stifle the voice of conscience, to efface the last vestige of honour, and to deaden any fibre in his breast that may respond to the throbbings of his country. Odysseus. If, as thou seemedst to say, the empire of the Czars being already incompact and vast, a little more added to the extremity of this enormous lever would render it so cumbrous that no human arm could support it, policy would not urge the Autocrat to extend his dominions any farther. Trelawny. It surely is a rational and just desire, and countenanced by the soundest policy, to annex whatever is within the Greek communion, with the sole exception of the land of Greece, which is too far off, and would be too restless, too vulnerable, and greatly more serviceable and much less invidious as an ally. Nothing can exceed the levity and impudence of French politicians, who reprehend and condemn this imaginary project, while their court interferes in behalf of the Catholic Greeks, and presumes even to threaten the majority of the nation, if these are compelled to perform the duties of citizens. While they were compelled by Turkey to perform the offices of slaves, no threat was heard, no complaint. Russia, having a right Tersitza. O those horrid creatures! what makes by treaty to interfere in behalf of her communion, them noble? what makes them dignified? exhibits more discretion and moderation. She Odysseus. Tersitza! we see few, excepting sol- appears to have read in the astrological section of Trelawny. If they apprehend any danger from her, they should connive at the accumulation of her territory. She is weakened by every people she enslaves, because the extremities are weightier than the centre. Europe, far from being threatened by her with future irruption of barbarians, is preserved from it. She will civilise her tribes; she can not amalgamate nor unite them. Were she mistress of Turkey, she would soon lose Poland: and the Turks, being a nobler and more dignified race than the Muscovites, would, under Muscovite discipline, expel them. her almanack, compiled in London and revised in Paris, that conquest will ruin her, and she shrinks back in vacancy with her sword unsheathed. Odysseus. Luxury is more likely to enfeeble her; for, barbarous as she is, she is no less dissolute. : Trelawny. I believe it was never contradicted nor doubted, that every great empire has decayed through luxury this theory I suspect to be unfounded. Luxury, if confined to few, can do little mischief to the people at large, particularly where the population lies scattered; if general, there can be no better proof of the state's flourishing condition; no surer exposition of its tutelary laws. It is only when great interests clash, only when great properties are torn away and insulated from the mass, only when one portion of the citizens has something to compensate it for the loss of country, and the other can sustain no loss whatever, that nations are enslaved and ruined. We must regulate the index of luxury by the places we are in, and calculate its effects by what it acts on. The Babylonians, the Persians, the Macedonians, the Tartars, were ruined by their conquests. Rome was not subdued on the trichlinia of Apicius or Petronius. Her citizens fell away and yielded to the enemy, when no common bond of interest held them together; when they possessed large estates in the provinces, and their money was put out to interest in them. By degrees the chief property of the Roman senators and gentleman lay out of Italy; which country therefore was deserted by the Genius of Agriculture. Innumerable slaves were employed about their villas and gardens, while their tables were supplied from Syria, Pamphylia, Egypt, and Numidia. They were never so respectable, never so formidable, as when they spent many months of the year on their patrimonial estates; small ones, and thence near enough one to another both for conviviality and for checks. A man is not the weaker in mind or body for eating a turbot in preference to a roach, or a peacock in preference to a raven: in his social state he is the weaker, and deplorably indeed, when his interests and affections lie beyond his country, which soon pines away at his indifference. Odysseus. Now, Trelawny, turn thy attention a little to thyself. Thou camest hither with an ardent and intense desire of doing good: activity is requisite to thee. While the goats are being milked, and such other refreshments are preparing for us as the place affords, let me again exhort thee to consider well, I do not say the danger of remaining with me (for that would only fix thee), but the probability of long inaction. I know my enemies: I am aware of their machinations: I shall defeat them in my own manner, at my own season. Trelawny. He by whose courage and conduct more Turks have fallen than by any other chieftain's, may defy them still. Dismiss me, Odysseus, when I am found unworthy of fighting at your side, or unable to execute the most arduous of your commands. Odysseus. Of ability and of zeal thou hast given me many proofs. The memory of thy courage and of thy friendship lies deep within my heart; but without witnesses, without reward: for those who have fought with me may die with me before another year; and England, in the prodigality of her honours, hath none in reserve for the champions of Greece. Beside . . I am slow to mention it in thy presence. . English officers are accustomed to some conveniences. Trelawny. I am no longer one of them. Lieutenants and ensigns all expect to find here, on the morning of their arrival, a new colonel's uniform hanging over the back of the sofa, with a pair of shining boots on the carpet in the centre of it, reflecting their equally smooth countenances. Odysseus. We have nothing of this: we have only reeds and rushes; for they grow in moist places, where the enemy can not burn them: and when we lay down our bodies on the field, we press a couch strown over with such spoils as they perhaps would not go into battle for, but the best in my opinion that any one can win .. sound sleep from sound consciences, and, more refreshing than soundest sleep, dreams of victory from hard fighting. Do not fancy me ungrateful or invidious: it is true, I expected more from the reputation of England for public spirit and enlightened counsels. Trelawny. We were dealers and chapmen when we were at the best: we are now gamblers and sharpers: purse-bearers to Ali-Pasha, purveyors to Ibrahim-Bey, slave-importers and pandars to Turk, Algerine, and Egyptian. Even those who press forward to offer you their gold, filch from you while they offer it; and you will find among these liberal men more roguery and robbery than among the vilest slaves of the harem. The spirit of spe culation possesses them; of all spirits the most unclean, and the last to be exorcised. Odysseus. When I hear an Englishman speak thus of his country, I am only the more inclined to believe in his ardent love for her. He remembers what she has been, he feels what she ought to be, he anticipates what she may be, and he misrepresents what she is. Such is the effect of passion, which has been the purest and tenderest on torn and ulcerated hearts: indifference is free from it. Be thou, O Trelawny! what the insensible can be without an effort, the generous on some occasions not.. be just. Tersitza. Do I disturb you grave men by coming back so soon to you? Brother, I know you choose milk: drink this while it is warm and froths. It hums and buzzes as if there were flies upon it; but there are none in the cavern ; so you may take a large draught freely. You, being an Englishman, will prefer wine: here is some, very sweet. Trelawny. If Tersitza has proved it. |
