March 1829 the three powers delimited the Greek frontier. The line ran east and west from the Gulf of Volo to the Gulf of Arta, and assigned to the new state no more and no less territory than the districts that had effectively asserted their independence against the sultan in 1821. This settlement was the only one possible under the circumstances; but it was essentially transitory, for it neglected the natural line of nationality altogether, and left a numerical majority of the Greek race, as well as the most important centres of its life, under the old régime of servitude. Even the liberated area was not at the end of its troubles. In the spring of 1827, when they committed themselves into the hands of their foreign patrons, the Greeks had found a new president for the republic in John Kapodistrias, an intimate of Alexander the tsar. Kapodistrias was a Corfiote count, with a Venetian education and a career in the Russian diplomatic service, and no one could have been more fantastically unsuitable for the task of reconstructing the country to which he was called. Kapodistrias’ ideal was the _fin-de-siècle_ ‘police-state’; but ‘official circles’ did not exist in Greece, and he had no acquaintance with the peasants and sailors whom he hoped to redeem by bureaucracy. He instituted a hierarchically centralized administration which made the abortive constitution of Mavrokordatos seem sober by comparison; he trampled on the liberty of the rising press, which was the most hopeful educational influence in the country; and he created superfluous ministerial portfolios for his untalented brothers. In fact he reglamented Greece from his palace at Aigina like a divinely appointed autocrat, from his arrival in January 1828 till the summer of 1831, when he provoked the Hydhriots to open rebellion, and commissioned the Russian squadron in attendance to quell them by a naval action, with the result that Poros was sacked by the President’s regular army and the national fleet was completely destroyed. After that, he attempted to rule as a military dictator, and fell foul of the Mavromichalis of Maina. The Mainates knew better how to deal with the ‘police-state’ than the Hydhriots; and on October 9, 1831, Kapodistrias was assassinated in Nauplia, at the church door, by two representatives of the Mavromichalis clan.