THE WAR OF GREEK INDEPENDENCE 1821 TO 1833 BY W.ALISON PHILLIPS 1897

ESTABLISHMENT OF A CENTRAL BUREAUCRACY 289
was secured by appointing him commander of the
forces in the Morea.
Under such auspices
it is possible that a wise and
far-sighted statesman might have succeeded in carrying
through his schemes of reform, and in founding
a strong personal government based on the good-will
and the gratitude of the people. But Capodistrias was
neither wise nor far-seeing.
He was a man of a cutand-dried
system, which he was determined to impose,
at all hazards, upon the country he governed ;
and so,
as his difficulties increased, and as the opposition,
which had at first not ventured to make itself heard,
gathered in force and bitterness, his government, from
being merely irritating and oppressive, gradually developed
into a tyranny.
Before long, and step by step,
the whole machinery of Russian autocracy had been
established on the free soil of Greece:
an absolutely
centralised government based on an elaborate system
of espionage and of secret police, and supported by
arbitrary imprisonment, censorship of the press,
intimidation
of local authorities, and all the other
weapons of irresponsible rule. Even the immemorial
communal liberties, which the Ottomans
had suffered to survive,
were now destroyed by the
jealous distrust 6f the ex-Minister of Russia;
and, in
all Hellas, there was soon no power left to oppose,
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