The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Volume 1Gwynn, Stephen Lucius
History
The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Volume 1
Gwynn, Stephen Lucius
Dilke, Charles Wentworth, Sir, 1843-1911; Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 19th century
"The Greek kingdom is a failure, we are told. Greece, liberated by the
wise foresight of Mr. Canning, but left, on his ill-timed death,
without Thessaly, Epirus, Crete, has been starved and shorn by the
Great Powers. As once said Lafayette, "the greater part of Greece was
left out of Greece." What kind of Greece is a Greece which does not
include Lemnos, Lesbos, or Mitylene, Chios, Mount Olympus, Mount Ossa,
and Mount Athos? Not only the larger part, but the most Greek part of
Greece, was omitted from the Hellenic kingdom. Crete and the other
islands, the coast of Thrace, and the Greek colony at Constantinople,
are the Greek Greece indeed, for Continental Greece within the limits
of the kingdom is by race half Slav and half Albanian. We must not,
however, attach too much importance to this fact, for in all times the
Greeks have been a little people, grafting themselves on to various
barbaric stocks. Race is a small thing by the side of national spirit,
and in national spirit the Greeks are as little Slav as the Italians
are Teutonic. Even the corrupting influence of long slavery--and it
was deep indeed--had not touched this spirit, and the very thieves and
robbers of the hills of Greece made for themselves in Byron's days a
glorious name in history. I do not think that Greece has failed. I
believe in Greece, believe In the ultimate replacement of the Turkish
State by powerful and progressive Greece, attached in friendship to
France and England, her creators--an outpost of Western Europe in the
East; and I think the day will come when even Homer's city may once
more be Greek. Those who do not wish to see Slavonic claims pushed
much farther than justice needs should speak their word on behalf of
Greece."
From this ideal he never swerved, and the authority which he possessed in
European politics helped to keep it present before the mind of Europe.
Greece knew her friend, and after his death the Municipality of Athens
gave his name--_hodos Dilke_--to a fine street in the true mother city of
Hellas. [Footnote: "The name of Sir Charles Dilke is more highly prized in
Greece than that of any living Englishman," wrote M. Zinopoulos, General
Secretary to the Ministry of the Interior in Greece. "This feeling still
survived in 1887, when we went to Athens," adds Sir Charles's note.] He
never lived to see Hellenic government extend itself over Turkish fiefs,
except in that poor strip of northern territory which, thanks greatly to
his exertions, was secured for Greece in 1881. But before this memorial of
him could be completed, while those who worked on it were still searching
among his papers to reconstitute the projects he had shaped, came the
realization of some of his premonitions, and the end of Turkish sway in
"the most Greek parts of Greece."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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