Coexistent with this rude peasantry, there is an educated class whose numbers are also limited by the fixed amount of rent and taxes, on which they depend for their support, and by means of which they perpetuate themselves by the side of the rude agriculturists, giving the towns all the appearance of civilisation. This unfortunate state of society is not new in the history of the Greek nation: it has now existed for more than 1000 years, and it forms the prominent feature in the internal organisation of the Byzantine empire. Judging from the records of that government, it is a state of society that presents greater obstacles to change than any social combinations which the history of the human race reveals to the west of China. The cultivators of the soil cannot improve their condition or increase in number; the educated classes are interested in opposing change, and have influence enough to prevent it: poverty in the country, and meanness in the towns, render the universal moral degradation an element of stability in the political condition of a nation whose social state is such as we have described. There remains an important class of society in Greece, which we have not yet mentioned, because it has been excluded from all political influence since the formation of the Hellenic monarchy. This is the mercantile class. Before the revolutionary war, and during the contest with the Turks, it was the Greek merchants and shipowners who formed the aristocracy of the nation; but this class is now almost null in the movement of political affairs at Athens. The greater part of the able, respectable, and wealthy merchants have quitted the country, and are to be found at Odessa, Trieste, Marseilles, London, and Manchester, not in King Otho’s dominions. A small fraction of shipowners remain, but the small schooners that now compose the mercantile navy of Greece cannot be compared with the fine ships that Hydra, Spetzia, and Psara formerly sent out to engage the Turkish fleet; and the comparative increase of the tonnage of the trading vessels of large size in Greece and Turkey, since 1840, shows that the trade of the Levant is extending more rapidly under the Turkish than under the Greek flag.