seem sober by comparison; he trampled on the liberty of the rising press, which was the most hopeful educational influence in the country; and he created superfluous ministerial portfolios for his untalented brothers.  In fact he reglamented Greece from his palace at Aigina like a divinely appointed autocrat, from his arrival in January 1828 till the summer of 1831, when he provoked the Hydhriots to open rebellion, and commissioned the Russian squadron in attendance to quell them by a naval action, with the result that Poros was sacked by the President’s regular army and the national fleet was completely destroyed.  After that, he attempted to rule as a military dictator, and fell foul of the Mavromichalis of Maina.  The Mainates knew better how to deal with the ‘police-state’ than the Hydhriots; and on October 9, 1831, Kapodistrias was assassinated in Nauplia, at the church door, by two representatives of the Mavromichalis clan.

The country lapsed into utter anarchy.  Peloponnesians and Armatoli, Kolokotronists and Kolettists, alternately appointed and deposed subservient national assemblies and governing commissions by naked violence, which culminated in a gratuitous and disastrous attack upon the French troops stationed in Peloponnesos for their common protection.  The three powers realized that it was idle to liberate Greece from Ottoman government unless they found her another in its place.  They decided on monarchy, and offered the crown, in February 1832, to Prince Otto, a younger son of the King of Bavaria.  The negotiations dragged on many months longer than Greece could afford to wait.  But in July 1832 the sultan recognized the sovereign independence of the kingdom of Hellas in consideration of a cash indemnity; and in February 1833, just a year after the first overtures had been made, the appointed king arrived at Nauplia with a decorative Bavarian staff and a substantial loan from the allies.

3

The Consolidation of the State

Half the story of Greece is told.  We have watched the nation awake and put forth its newly-found strength in a great war of independence, and we have followed the course of the struggle to its result—­the foundation of the kingdom of Hellas.

It is impossible to close this chapter of Greek history without a sense of disappointment.  The spirit of Greece had travailed, and only a principality was born, which gathered within its frontiers scarcely one-third of the race, and turned for its government to a foreign administration which had no bond of tradition or affinity with the population it was to rule.  And yet something had been achieved.  An oasis had been wrested from the Turkish wilderness, in which Hellenism could henceforth work out its own salvation untrammelled, and extend its borders little by little, until it brought within them at last the whole of its destined heritage.  The fleeting glamour of dawn had passed, but it had brought the steady light of day, in which the work begun could be carried out soberly and indefatigably to its conclusion.  The new kingdom, in fact, if it fulfilled its mission, might become the political nucleus and the spiritual ensample of a permanently awakened nation—­an ’education of Hellas’ such as Pericles hoped to see Athens become in the greatest days of Ancient Greece.