altogether to her advantage.  Be that as it may, Greece, whether by fault or misfortune, had failed during this half-century to apply herself successfully to the cure of her defects and the exploitation of her assets, though she did not lack leaders strong-minded enough to summon her to the dull business of the present.  Her history during the succeeding generation was a struggle between the parties of the Present and the Future, and the unceasing discomfiture of the former is typified in the tragedy of Trikoupis, the greatest modern Greek statesman before the advent of Venezelos.

Trikoupis came into power in 1882, just after the acquisition of the rich agricultural province of Thessaly under the Treaty of Berlin had given the kingdom a fresh start.  There were no such continuous areas of good arable land within the original frontiers, and such rare patches as there were had been desolated by those eight years of savage warfare[1] which had been the price of liberty.  The population had been swept away by wholesale massacres of racial minorities in every district; the dearth of industrious hands had allowed the torrents to play havoc with the cultivation-terraces on the mountain slopes; and the spectre of malaria, always lying in wait for its opportunity, had claimed the waterlogged plains for its own.  During the fifty years of stagnation little attempt had been made to cope with the evil, until now it seemed almost past remedy.

[Footnote 1:  1821-28]

If, however, the surface of the land offered little prospect of wealth for the moment, there were considerable treasures to be found beneath it.  A metalliferous bolt runs down the whole east coast of the Greek mainland, cropping up again in many of the Aegean islands, and some of the ores, of which there is a great variety, are rare and valuable.  The lack of transit facilities is partly remedied by the fact that workable veins often lie near enough to the sea for the produce to be carried straight from mine to ship, by an endless-chain system of overhead trolleys; so that, once capital is secured for installing the plant and opening the mine, profitable operations can be carried on irrespective of the general economic condition of the country.  Trikoupis saw how much potential wealth was locked up in these mineral seams.  The problem was how to attract the capital necessary to tap it.  The nucleus round which have accumulated those immense masses of mobilised capital that are the life-blood of modern European industry and commerce, was originally derived from the surplus profits of agriculture.  But a country that finds itself reduced, like Greece in the nineteenth century, to a state of agricultural bankruptcy, has obviously failed to save any surplus in the process, so that it is unable to provide from its own pocket the minimum outlay it so urgently needs in order to open for itself some new activity.  If it is to obtain a fresh start on other lines, it must secure the co-operation of the foreign investor,