Spetza, and Psara, three barren little islands in the Aegean, had begun to lay the foundations of a merchant marine, when Napoleon’s boycott and the British blockade, which left no neutral flag but the Ottoman in the Mediterranean, presented the Greek shipmen that sailed under it with an opportunity they exploited to the full.  The whitewashed houses of solid stone, rising tier above tier up the naked limestone mountainside, still testify to the prosperity which chance thus suddenly brought to the Hydhriots and their fellow islanders, and did not withdraw again till it had enabled them to play a decisive part in their nation’s history.

Their ships were small, but they were home-built, skilfully navigated, and profitably employed in the carrying trade of the Mediterranean ports.  Their economic life was based on co-operation, for the sailors, as well as the captain and owner of the ship, who were generally the same person, took shares in the outlay and profit of each voyage; but their political organization was oligarchical—­an executive council elected by and from the owners of the shipping.  Feud and intrigue were rife between family and family, class and class, and between the native community and the resident aliens, without seriously affecting the vigour and enterprise of the commonwealth as a whole.  These seafaring islands on the eve of the modern Greek Revolution were an exact reproduction of the Aigina, Korinth, and Athens which repelled the Persian from Ancient Greece.  The germs of a new national life were thus springing up among the Greeks in every direction—­ in mercantile colonies scattered over the world from Odessa to Alexandria and from Smyrna to Trieste; among Phanariot princes in the Danubian Provinces and their ecclesiastical colleagues at Constantinople; in the islands of the Aegean and the Ionian chain, and upon the mountains of Suli and Agrapha.  But the ambitions this national revival aroused were even greater than the reality itself.  The leaders of the movement did not merely aspire to liberate the Greek nation from the Turkish yoke.  They were conscious of the assimilative power their nationality possessed.  The Suliots, for example, were an immigrant Albanian tribe, who had learnt to speak Greek from the Greek peasants over whom they tyrannized.  The Hydhriot and Spetziot islanders were Albanians too, who had even clung to their primitive language during the two generations since they took up their present abode, but had become none the less firmly linked to their Greek-speaking neighbours in Peloponnesos by their common fellowship in the Orthodox Church.  The numerous Albanian colonies settled up and down the Greek continent were at least as Greek in feeling as they.  And why should not the same prove true of the Bulgarian population, in the Balkans, who had belonged from the beginning to the Orthodox Church, and had latterly been brought by improvident Ottoman policy within the Greek patriarch’s fold?  Or why should not the Greek administrators beyond the