endowing the nation with further educational opportunities.  Public spirit is a Greek virtue.  There are few villages which do not possess monuments of their successful sons, and a school is an even commoner gift than a church; while the State has supplemented the individual benefactor to an extent remarkable where public resources are so slender.  The school-house, in fact, is generally the most prominent and substantial building in a Greek village, and the advantage offered to the Epirots by a rapprochement with the Greeks is concretely symbolized by the Greek schools established to-day in generous numbers throughout their country.

For the Epirot boy the school is the door to the future.  The language he learns there makes him the member of a nation, and opens to him a world wide enough to employ all the talent and energy he may possess, if he seeks his fortune at Patras or Peiraeus, or in the great Greek commercial communities of Alexandria and Constantinople; while, if he stays at home, it still affords him a link with the life of civilized Europe through the medium of the ubiquitous Greek newspaper.[1] The Epirot has thus become Greek in soul, for he has reached the conception of a national life more liberal than the isolated existence of his native village through the avenue of Greek culture.  ‘Hellenism’ and nationality have become for him identical ideas; and when at last the hour of deliverance struck, he welcomed the Greek armies that marched into his country from the south and the east, after the fall of Yannina in the spring of 1913, with the same enthusiasm with which all the enslaved populations of native Greek dialect greeted the consummation of a century’s hopes.

[Footnote 1:  There is still practically no literature printed in the Albanian language.]

The Greek troops arrived only just in time, for the ‘Hellenism’ of the Epirots had been terribly proved by murderous attacks from their Moslem neighbours on the north.  The latter speak a variety of the same Albanian tongue, but were differentiated by a creed which assimilated them to the ruling race.  They had been superior to their Christian kinsmen by the weight of numbers and the possession of arms, which under the Ottoman regime were the monopoly of the Moslem.  At last, however, the yoke of oppression was broken and the Greek occupation seemed a harbinger of security for the future.  Unluckily, however, Epirus was of interest to others besides its own inhabitants.  It occupies an important geographical position facing the extreme heel of Italy, just below the narrowest point in the neck of the Adriatic, and the Italian Government insisted that the country should be included in the newly erected principality of Albania, which the powers had reserved the right to delimit in concert by a provision in the Treaty of London.