But they exhibit also the cheering symptoms of social improvement; they have proved they still possess the qualities to which their ancestors’ greatness was owing. They are lively, ardent, and persevering, passionately desirous of knowledge, and indefatigable in the pursuit of it. The whole life which yet animates the Ottoman Empire is owing to their intelligence and activity. The stagnation of despotism is unknown among them; if the union of civilisation is unhappily equally unknown, that is a virtue of the manhood, and not to be looked for in the infancy of nations. The consciousness of deficiencies is the first step to their removal; the pride of barbarism, the self-sufficiency of ignorance, is the real bar to improvement; and a nation which is capable of making the efforts for improvement which the Greeks are doing, if not in possession of political greatness, is on the road to it.” Now, to the first proposition contained in the above remarks, that the Great Powers were perfectly justified in their intervention to save the Greeks from the lawless ferocity of the Turks, we have no objections to offer. It is a gladdening thing to believe and to see that the strong cry of human sympathy will sometimes be listened to even by politicians, and that heartless diplomacy in the public intercourse between people and people is not all in all. But the summary expulsion of the Turks from European Turkey, even supposing it were not too great a punishment for the offence, would, when achieved, leave the most difficult part of the Greek problem unsolved. Sir Archibald assumes that the discordant and crude elements of which European Turkey, less the Turks, is composed, would, in 1827, have readily coalesced, or is ready now, in 1854, to coalesce, into a great Greek empire, of which Constantinople shall be the capital. That the Greeks themselves should believe this is natural; that Sir Archibald Alison should believe it, carried away by a noble sympathy with a heroic theme, is but the radiation of that fire with which the noblest minds burn most intensely; but we have never conversed with an individual practically conversant with the elements of which Christian Turkey is composed, who looked upon such a consummation, in the present age at least, as possible. A very intelligent and patriotic Greek gentleman once remarked in our hearing, that the Greek kingdom could never prosper in its present tiny dimensions; that the Greek Islands—except Corcyra, which the English must keep as a naval station—with Thessaly, and part of Thrace and Macedonia, must be added to it before it could be free from that spirit of petty intrigue which is the great vice of small governments. This is intelligible; because the population included under such an extended Greek kingdom would, by a great predominance both of numbers and moral forces, be essentially Greek. But when it is proposed seriously to revive a Byzantine empire,