Greece is a most unfortunate country. She has only escaped the Turks to be plundered by her rulers and ruined by her protectors. Seventeen years ago, Lord Palmerston placed King Otho on his throne; he has since been occupied in making that throne an uneasy seat. King Otho refuses to answer Lord Palmerston’s letters; in revenge, Great Britain ruins a number of Greek shipowners, and leaves the Greek ministers unpunished. The Duke of Wellington has said that he never bombarded a town, and never saw the necessity for committing such an act of cruelty; and the saying does him even more honour than his long career of victory. We had hoped that no Englishman would ever have forgotten this saying; yet Lord Palmerston bombards the merchants of Greece for the faults of King Otho’s ministers. We are irresistibly reminded, by this last display of our Foreign Secretary’s warlike propensities, of Mr Winkle’s fight with the small boy. Though much has been written on the subject of this quarrel, both at home and on the Continent, no clear statement of the exact relations between England and Greece has been published; nor can it be gathered even from the papers recently laid before Parliament.[1] We believe, therefore, that our readers will thank us for devoting a few pages to a serious examination of the political relations between the two countries, which will tend to place the recent coercive measures in their true light. This is the more necessary, because Ministers, both in debates and Parliamentary papers, have it in their power to conceal everything relating to the past; and the Opposition must hunt long before they can spring a single truth in the thickets of official deception. A view of the subject, under the guidance of truth and common sense, free both from party views and national prejudices, has been rendered necessary by the speech of Mr Piscatory, the late French Minister in Greece. The spoken pamphlet of Mr Piscatory was prepared with considerable skill; but it communicates hardly a single fact that has not been perverted by being removed from its true context, or by having only half its concomitant circumstances narrated. Indeed, Mr Piscatory having been bellows-blower in the disputes between Sir E. Lyons, the English envoy at Athens, and King Otho’s ministers, for four years, is not a famous witness; he has his own secrets to conceal. His oratorical display did not impose on the good sense of General Cavaignac, who parodied Sylla’s speech to a wordy Athenian ambassador, by hinting to the French ex-minister plenipotentiary, “that it seemed France had sent him to Athens to study rhetoric, not to collect information.”