and the capitalist with a ready market for his money will only put it into enterprises where he has some guarantee of its safety.  There was little doubt that the minerals of Greece would well repay extraction; the uncertain element was the Greek nation itself.  The burning question of national unity might break out at any moment into a blaze of war, and, in the probable case of disaster, involve the whole country and all interests connected with it in economic as well as political ruin.  Western Europe would not commit itself to Greek mining enterprise, unless it felt confident that the statesman responsible for the government of Greece would and could restrain his country from its instinctive impulse towards political adventure.

The great merit of Trikoupis was that he managed to inspire this confidence.  Greece owes most of the wheelroads, railways, and mines of which she can now boast to the dozen years of his more or less consecutive administration.  But the roads are unfinished, the railway-network incomplete, the mines exploited only to a fraction of their capacity, because the forces against Trikoupis were in the end too strong for him.  It may be that his eye too rigidly followed the foreign investor’s point of view, and that by adopting a more conciliatory attitude towards the national ideal, he might have strengthened his position at home without impairing his reputation abroad; but his position was really made impossible by a force quite beyond his control, the irresponsible and often intolerable behaviour which Turkey, under whatever regime, has always practised towards foreign powers, and especially towards those Balkan states which have won their freedom in her despite, while perforce abandoning a large proportion of their race to the protracted outrage of Turkish misgovernment.

Several times over the Porte, by wanton insults to Greece, wrecked the efforts of Trikoupis to establish good relations between the two governments, and played the game of the chauvinist party led by Trikoupis’ rival, Deliyannis.  Deliyannis’ tenures of office were always brief, but during them he contrived to undo most of the work accomplished by Trikoupis in the previous intervals.  A particularly tense ‘incident’ with Turkey put him in power in 1893, with a strong enough backing from the country to warrant a general mobilization.  The sole result was the ruin of Greek credit.  Trikoupis was hastily recalled to office by the king, but too late.  He found himself unable to retrieve the ruin, and retired altogether from politics in 1895, dying abroad next year in voluntary exile and enforced disillusionment.