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

402 THE WAR OF GREEK INDEPENDENCE
really effective, because it was in constant danger of
being hampered by the outspokenness of English public
opinion, which is not in sympathy with Turkish
methods of government. The net result, then, of sixty
years of British diplomacy in the near East is that, at
the present moment, every vestige of influence which
England ever possessed at Constantinople has vanished
;
and Greece, which might have been a bulwark
of British power in the Mediterranean, lies crushed
and bleeding beneath the heel of the Turk. How far
this latter fact is due to the action of English statesmen,
and how far to the vanity and impatience of the
Greeks themselves, may be left for the future to decide.
To the author it seems probable that the cautious
diplomacy of Lord Salisbury was directed to the
creation of that greater Greece which the precipitate
action of the Greeks themselves, and in no slight degree
also the ill-judged agitation
of Philhellenes in
England and elsewhere, has rendered impossible for
at least a 1
generation to come.
To the constitution of a nation, however, more is
1 1 do not think this opinion inconsistent with a sincere
sympathy with the original struggle of the Greeks for freedom,
or even with their desire for further expansion. But,
from the point of view of European sentiment, there is all
the difference in the world between the love of liberty and
the desire of territorial aggrandisement. A war under-