Until a nation has completely vindicated its right to exist, it is hard for it to settle down and make its life worth living.  We nations of western Europe (before disaster fell upon us) had learnt to take our existence for granted, and ‘Politics’ for us had come to mean an organized effort to improve the internal economy of our community.  But a foreigner who picked up a Greek newspaper would have found in it none of the matter with which he was familiar in his own, no discussion of financial policy, economic development, or social reconstruction.  The news-columns would have been monopolized by foreign politics, and in the cafes he would have heard the latest oscillation in the international balance of power canvassed with the same intense and minute interest that Englishmen in a railway-carriage would have been devoting to Old Age Pensions, National Health Insurance, or Land Valuation.  He would have been amazed by a display of intimate knowledge such as no British quidnunc could have mustered if he had happened to stumble across these intricacies of international competition, and the conversation would always have terminated in the same unanswered but inconscionable challenge to the future:  ’When will the oppressed majority of our race escape the Turkish yoke?  If the Ottoman dominion is destroyed, what redistribution of its provinces will follow?  Shall we then achieve our national unity, or will our Balkan neighbours encroach upon the inheritance which is justly ours?’

This preoccupation with events beyond the frontiers was not caused by any lack of vital problems within them.  The army was the most conspicuous object of public activity, but it was not an aggressive speculation, or an investment of national profits deliberately calculated to bring in one day a larger return.  It was a necessity of life, and its efficiency was barely maintained out of the national poverty.  In fact, it was almost the only public utility with which the nation could afford to provide itself, and the traveller from Great Britain would have been amazed again at the miserable state of all reproductive public works.  The railways were few and far between, their routes roundabout, and their rolling-stock scanty, so that trains were both rare and slow.  Wheel-roads were no commoner a feature in Greece than railways are here, and such stretches as had been constructed had often never come into use, because they had just failed to reach their goal or were still waiting for their bridges, so that they were simply falling into decay and converting the outlay of capital upon them into a dead loss.  The Peiraeus was the only port in the country where steamers could come alongside a quay, and discharge their cargoes directly on shore.  Elsewhere, the vessel must anchor many cables’ lengths out, and depend on the slow and expensive services of lighters, for lack of pier construction and dredging operations.  For example, Kalamata, the economic outlet for the richest part of Peloponnesos, and the fifth largest port in the kingdom,[1] was and still remains a mere open roadstead, where all ships that call are kept at a distance by the silt from a mountain torrent, and so placed in imminent danger of being driven, by the first storm, upon the rocks of a neighbouring peninsula.