Equally groundless was the notion that the issue of translations was part of a scheme to which the Queen (a Russian princess) was supposed to be accessory, for the purpose of playing into the hands of the Russians in Macedonia, by leading the Greek population to surrender their birthright as the lawful heirs of the New Testament. To understand this suspicion we must remember that the Greeks had long prided themselves on the fact that they and they alone could read the very words of the New Testament in their own tongue, and they were afraid that they would forfeit this distinction and be reduced to a level with their Slavonic neighbours, if the need for a translation were admitted.[9] However inconsistent it may seem, this attachment to the Greek of the New Testament is only another phase of the same pride of ancestry that is seen in the straining after classical Greek.[10] The desire to pose before the world as the descendants of the nation which produced Homer and Æschylus and Pericles and Plato and Demosthenes has led them to sacrifice in some measure the real interests of the nation to the glamour of a remote and glorious past. Just as they have been ashamed of some mediæval monuments which reminded them of humiliating epochs in their history, so they have tried to get rid of words and forms which bore the stamp of foreign ascendency. But such affectation cannot alter facts, and is bad for the _morale_ of a nation. The pride of birth, when carried to excess, may hurt the character of a people no less than of an individual, and foster a theatrical and pretentious spirit. It is easy to see that in the education of the young it cannot be favourable to vigour or spontaneity of thought if the pupil is denied the use of the words to which he has been accustomed from his earliest years. With such a discord between experience and expression, it is no wonder that the Greek people have produced so little native literature during the last two thousand years, and that they are so largely dependent at the present time on foreign authorship, especially Russian, English, and French. The loss sustained in almost all the practical departments of the national life, both sacred and secular, is alleged to be scarcely less serious. It can hardly be otherwise, indeed, if the language employed in public documents is only partially or with difficulty understood by a large proportion of the people for whom it is intended. Moreover, it cannot be good for the nation to be divided, intellectually speaking, into two more or less antagonistic camps, corresponding roughly to the educated and the uneducated.