We may now turn from examining the position of King Otho and the Greek government in relation to their foreign policy, and take a glance at the social and political condition of the nation. We must commence by enumerating what the people have neglected to do. This will serve to show how great the difficulties now are in the way of improving the country. During the ten years of representative government which have now elapsed, the Greek deputies have made no systematic efforts to improve the condition of the agricultural population, though three-quarters of the inhabitants of Greece are chiefly dependent on agriculture for their subsistence. No attempt has been made to reform the barbarous method of collecting the land-tax in kind, which retains the population in the stationary condition into which it fell on the decline of the Byzantine Empire. The municipalities have been allowed to become the vehicles of court corruption, and no measures have been taken to enforce regular publication of their receipts and expenditure. No criminal statistics are published. Instead of appropriating annually a sum of money for the construction of roads, bridges, quays, and ferry-boats, which are so necessary in a mountainous and insular State, the national interests are sacrificed to the gains of individual senators and deputies. New places are annually created, and the trade of Greece is transferred to Austrian and French steam-companies. The greatest commercial advantages ever placed at the disposal of any people have been neglected by the Greek nation, and perhaps completely thrown away by their late devotion to Russia. Yet the Greeks, who see the number of foreign steamers daily increasing in their ports, boast with their usual childish vanity of their superiority over every other people in naval skill. They even throw out hints in their political writings that the real cause of Lord Palmerston’s dissatisfaction with King Otho was founded on a reasonable jealousy of the Greek navy, and a patriotic fear lest the subjects of that monarch should deprive England of her commercial supremacy! Yet while boasting in this Hellenic strain, like true descendants of the contemporaries of Juvenal and Lucian, they have allowed the most profitable part of their own coasting trade to pass into the hands of the Austrian Lloyd Steam Company. A tendency to social and political disintegration is quite as much a characteristic of the population of liberated Greece as it was of ancient Hellas. National differences, municipal distinctions, local interests, class prejudices, and individual pretensions, divide the people.