[Footnote 1:  The four chief ports being Peiraeus, Patras, Syra, and Volos.]

These grave shortcomings were doubtless due in part to the geographical character of the country, though it was clear, from what had actually been accomplished, that it would have been both possible and profitable to attempt much more, if the nation’s energy could have been secured for the work.  But it is hard to tinker at details when you are kept in a perpetual fever by a question of life and death, and the great preliminary questions of national unity and self-government remained still unsettled.

Before these supreme problems all other interests paled, for they were no will-o’-the-wisps of theoretical politics.  It needs a long political education to appreciate abstract ideas, and the Greeks were still in their political infancy, but the realization of Greater Greece implied for them the satisfaction of all their concrete needs at once.

So long as the status quo endured, they were isolated from the rest of Europe by an unbroken band of Turkish territory, stretching from the Aegean to the Adriatic Sea.  What was the use of overcoming great engineering difficulties to build a line of European gauge from Athens right up to the northern frontier, if Turkey refused to sanction the construction of the tiny section that must pass through her territory between the Greek railhead and the actual terminus of the European system at Salonika?  Or if, even supposing she withdrew her veto, she would have it in her power to bring pressure on Greece at any moment by threatening to sever communications along this vital artery?  So long as Turkey was there, Greece was practically an island, and her only communication with continental Europe lay through her ports.  But what use to improve the ports, when the recovery of Salonika, the fairest object of the national dreams, would ultimately change the country’s economic centre of gravity, and make her maritime as well as her overland commerce flow along quite other channels than the present?

Thus the Greek nation’s present was overshadowed by its future, and its actions paralysed by its hopes.  Perhaps a nation with more power of application and less of imagination would have schooled itself to the thought that these sordid, obtrusive details were the key to the splendours of the future, and would have devoted itself to the systematic amelioration of the cramped area which it had already secured for its own.  This is what Bulgaria managed to do during her short but wonderful period of internal growth between the Berlin Treaty of 1878 and the declaration of war against Turkey in 1912.  But Bulgaria, thanks to her geographical situation, was from the outset freer from the tentacles of the Turkish octopus than Greece had contrived to make herself by her fifty years’ start, while her temperamentally sober ambitions were not inflamed by such past traditions as Greece had inherited, not