When, therefore, we turn to the history of the kingdom, our disappointment is all the more intense, for in the first fifty years of its existence there is little development to record.  In 1882 King Otto’s principality presented much the same melancholy spectacle as it did in 1833, when he landed in Nauplia Bay, except that Otto himself had left the scene.  His Bavarian staff belonged to that reactionary generation that followed the overthrow of Napoleon in Europe, and attempted, heedless of Kapodistrias’ fiasco, to impose on Greece the bureaucracy of the ancien regime.  The Bavarians’ work was entirely destructive.  The local liberties which had grown up under the Ottoman dominion and been the very life of the national revival, were effectively repressed.  Hydhriot and Spetziot, Suliot and Mainate, forfeited their characteristic individuality, but none of the benefits of orderly and uniform government were realized.  The canker of brigandage defied all efforts to root it out, and in spite of the loans with which the royal government was supplied by the protecting powers, the public finance was subject to periodical breakdowns.  In 1837 King Otto, now of age, took the government into his own hands, only to have it taken out of them again by a revolution in 1843.  Thereafter he reigned as a constitutional monarch, but he never reconciled himself to the position, and in 1862 a second revolution drove him into exile, a scapegoat for the afflictions of his kingdom.  Bavarian then gave place to Dane, yet the afflictions continued.  In 1882 King George had been nineteen years on the throne[1] without any happier fortune than his predecessor’s.  It is true that the frontiers of the kingdom had been somewhat extended.  Great Britain had presented the new sovereign with the Ionian Islands as an inaugural gift, and the Berlin Conference had recently added the province of Thessaly.  Yet the major part of the Greek race still awaited liberation from the Turkish yoke, and regarded the national kingdom, chronically incapacitated by the twin plagues of brigandage and bankruptcy, with increasing disillusionment.  The kingdom of Hellas seemed to have failed in its mission altogether.

[Footnote 1:  King George, like King Otto, was only seventeen years old when he received his crown.]

What was the explanation of this failure?  It was that the very nature of the mission paralysed the state from taking the steps essential to its accomplishment.  The phenomenon has been, unhappily, only too familiar in the Nearer East, and any one who travelled in the Balkans in 1882, or even so recently as 1912, must at once have become aware of it.