called the Greek schism, to which it has shown an animosity greater even than that displayed toward the Protestant Church.  And yet I have always found the Orthodox Church in all its ramifications the most charitable and liberal of all the forms of Christianity with which I have come in contact.  No stranger is turned from the doors of a Greek convent or refused such succor as is in the power of its inmates, be he Protestant, atheist, or even of their bitterest enemies, the Roman Catholics.  No questions are ever asked, and it has twice happened to me that I have lodged at a Greek convent during the most rigid fasts of the Church, when the inmates sat down to a dinner of herbs and dry bread, while to me was given the best their resources could compass—­a roast lamb or kid, generally.  The kalogeros in attendance, when I was dining on one occasion with the prior of a convent on Good Friday, and ate flesh when the prior himself had nothing but herbs and bread, turned to his superior with a perplexed smile, saying, “Why! he is not even a Christian!” but was none the less cordial afterward—­he evidently had no other feeling than that of pity that a man who had been their protector (it was in Crete during the insurrection) should not enjoy the privileges of the Church.  This liberal hospitality on the part of the ecclesiastics makes the want of it on the part of the people all the more conspicuous and inexplicable.

In the event Comoundouros found his game of bluff a safe one, for his claims were just, and diplomacy was derelict, or there would have been no utility in the demonstration.  But the futility of the Greek threats was most conspicuously shown, for not a battalion got to the frontier in a condition to fight, and two batteries sent off from Athens in great pomp broke down so completely that not a gun was fit to go into action when they reached the frontier.  The (for them and for the moment) fortunate issue of the contention by the cession of the territory in dispute seemed to the Greeks in general due to their good military measures, and so confirmed them in the dangerous conviction that the powers were afraid that they might beat the Turks and open the question of Constantinople, etc., which the powers had determined should not be opened.  Tricoupi alone of all those who had a policy was of the opinion that the powers should not have interfered, but should have let the Greeks have their way and learn their lesson.  It was his opinion that the political education of the Greeks was thwarted by this continual intermeddling of the powers, which made their independence a fiction.  Subsequent events showed that he did not nourish that blind confidence in the military capacity of his countrymen which they had, but he said until they were allowed to test their abilities they would never know on what that confidence reposed.  The common opinion was that one Greek was worth ten Turks, even in the state of the Greek training.  This was not Tricoupi’s opinion, which was that it was impossible under the tutelage which the powers exercised for them to know the truth, and he had, from 1867, persistently urged the let-alone policy, which would at least enable them to find their level.