1853. His Opinion of our Government and Institutions.

39

liberty, I inquire first, whether the people have the law in themselves; whether there be in them, individually, liberty, which is self-government, and charity, which is mutual faith: and where I find that to be the case, I know from history and my own experience that it is the work of Christianity. Now with you this is so, evidently..

Here I see that you have indeed erected most wonderful factories and cotton-mills; but you do not make the poor people, men and women and children, work in them on Sundays, as the Gauls do in their country. You have, like them, labourers and mechanics, aspiring to better their condition; but yours prefer working, and quietly associating together, to the making of revolutions, and plunging others and themselves into misery. You have ragged children: but you clothe and educate them for useful work, instead of enlisting them as soldiers to kill their fellow-citizens; and they like learning to read and to work, rather than making an attempt to convulse society by their votes, and to subvert order by arms. Your metropolis is not a monumental town, like a part of theirs: but your monument is your commonwealth. I must apply to you as a nation, what you say in your great basilica on the tomb of the great architect who raised it: "Si monumentum requiris circumspice." You have raised, in those three hundred years, that well-balanced commonwealth to which I have already alluded, and you have established and maintained such a sanctuary of liberty as even our fathers did not possess in the great and glorious times of the Republic. You have known how to unite freedom with order, popular rights with a national aristocracy and hereditary monarchy, which union, our great heathen prophet Cicero* said, would, if ever it could be brought to pass, form the most perfect of governments. This great monument, which you have erected, I admire more than all those outer works of civilisation of which other people think you are so proud, not only as men of your race, but as Christians, and, I am bound to add, as Protestants. You have just shown to the world the practical effect of the principle on which your social arrangements are based. People on the Continent believed (or tried to make others believe) that the gathering of so many hundreds of thousands of your working and labouring men round the spectacle of the Great Exhibition would be the signal, if not of famine and pestilence, certainly of revolution and bloodshed. But I have seen them surround their queen with respectful affection: and, far from any disturbance taking place, good-will and good-humour and plenty never have reigned more paramount any where than during these months among you. Now when I ask myself, since what time you have possessed this liberty and enjoyed this peace and tranquillity, I cannot help remarking that you owe it all to that godly reform you began to make of Christianity about three hundred years ago.' (P. 14—18.)

Mr. Bunsen has added in a note the passages from Cicero's 'De Re Publica,' to which he refers, viz. lib. i. c. xxix. xxxv. xlv.

With these extracts we must close our notice of this highly interesting and remarkable book. We feel that we have failed to do full justice to it on many important points. To aver, however, that we entirely coincide in opinion and sentiment upon all the subjects and various questions which are brought before us in these pages, would be going too far. There are many matters upon which a member of the Evangelical Church of Germany must necessarily hold different views from ourselves; but upon all points of Christian charity, all truly Christian men can and ought to agree. We have sensibly felt the truth of Mr. Bunsen's remarks in the following passage; and having been aware of the treatment and misrepresentations which he has already received in certain quarters-in making these our observations upon his very learned and important work now before us, we have endeavoured, at least, to avoid their application to ourselves.

'On all these points I am prepared for misconstructions, contradictions, and attacks, from opposite quarters. Any author who in our times treats theological and ecclesiastical subjects frankly, and therefore with reference to the problems of the age, must expect to be ignored, and, if that cannot be done, abused and reviled. I shall, however, only notice such opponents as will discuss a sacred subject with an impartial love of truth, and who show themselves men of independent thought and of critical research. I shall quietly leave the others to their privileges, and by silence reply to such as enter into a philosophical discussion with the old cry, "Great is Diana of "the Ephesians!" It is impossible, in our times, to have an independent opinion on those subjects, without critical study and calm deliberate consideration; and yet everybody thinks himself entitled to pronounce judgment upon them. But the time will come when they will be again made the objects of universal interest and popular research. All tends to that, in Germany from the philosophical, in England from the practical, point of view; and, in both, from a feeling of great inward and outward necessity. Then it will be seen whether or not the way that I have indicated is the right one. Personally, it is perfectly indifferent to me whether I live to see this or not. I have neither written for my own personal gratification, nor for any party, either here or in Germany, nor for any fashion of the day. I have meditated and inquired from an earnest desire to discover truth, and to meet the wants of a confused and eventful age, which yearns after light and information; and I have said nothing which I have not thoroughly examined and tested for at least twentyfive years. Thus, while I shall not be scared by any dictatorial assertions, neither will any correction come unwelcome to me. the truth of the fundamental views which I have expressed, both here and throughout the work, and of the soundness of their philosophical and historical groundwork, I have as little doubt as I have of my own existence.' (Vol. iii. Introd. p. xxv.)

Of

1853. Jervis's History of Corfu and the Ionian Islands. 41

ART. II.-1. History of the Island of Corfu, and of the Republic of the Ionian Islands. By HENRY JERVIS WHITE JERVIS, Esq., Royal Artillery. London: 1852.

2. The Ionian Islands under British Protection. London: 1851.

THE

HE sources of information relative to the Ionian Islands are so redundant that they perplex a writer seeking to convey an accurate notion of the affairs of that small but interesting State. Within the last three years, various political essays on this subject have appeared, adding to the knowledge we might have previously derived from Theotoky, Vaudoncourt, Mustoxidi, Goodisson, Davy, and a host of English and French travellers and yacht voyageurs.

Few of these writers, we think, have treated their argument more successfully than the author of the succinct and connected narrative now before us. Mr. Jervis, free from any political or party bias, although sometimes misled by the authorities he quotes, appears to have availed himself of every opportunity for collecting the best materials for his history that a residence on duty in the Ionian Islands could afford him. He has evidently consulted all requisite and authentic documents within his reach, and studied the characters, habits, and institutions of the Ionian population; and seems to have particularly directed his attention to the Constitution launched under our auspices in 1817.

This anomalous provisional Constitution, or the character of its administration by the Lord High Commissioner of the day, has been frequently under discussion in Parliament, and sometimes roughly and incautiously dealt with, and exposed to the unwarrantable attacks of debaters, who probably had never taken the trouble of tracing it back to the extraordinary times and circumstances which gave it birth. We hope to be able, on this occasion, to assist our readers in forming a correct opinion, not merely on the progress of improvement in the United Ionian States, after their having been partially connected with Great Britain for a period of forty-three years, and under our absolute control for thirty-four, but also on the further point, whether the period had not arrived for loosening the tightbearing rein first applied in 1817, as the least of the evils between which the Government had then to choose under the plausible but inconsistent clauses of the Treaty of Paris, and in the actual condition of the Seven Islands.

But this is a more arduous undertaking than it would at first

seem; mystified as the question has been by the advocates of political parties, averse to any modification of the constitutional charter to which we refer, or by those who, ignorant of the true state of the case, are persuaded that neither the Ionians nor their neighbours, the Greeks, are fit to be trusted with a representative Government.

To disentangle the character of a State or of an individual from the hands of calumniators and injudicious admirers, is a task of great difficulty. While we desire to give a fair summary of the proceedings, complaints, intrigues, and factions of our quasi-colonial subjects, we must not forget to do them the justice of remembering how much they have suffered from a quick succession of temporary masters, and from the effects of misfortunes by which they were overwhelmed in 1797, and which they continued to feel intensely till 1809.

The partition of the Venetian territories, and the union of the Seven Islands with the French Republic, threw them into utter confusion. The innovations of French printing presses, public libraries, and primary schools, disturbed nobles, priests, and peasantry. The combined hostilities of the Turks and Russians led to the expulsion of the French, and to the reestablishment of the former councils of the Signori. A few months later, in the year 1800, the Islands were constituted a Federal Republic, vassal and tributary to the Porte, under the immediate sway of the notables of the country. These were selected through the powerful influence of the Albanian chief, Ali Pacha, who, having his own schemes in view, favoured the ancient families. The Notabili having been re-established in ancient despotism, with no other security for its exercise than the nominal Suzerainté of the Porte, the bloodshed and disorder which followed could scarcely have been prevented.

To this tempestuous season we have been constantly referred whenever a debate on the affairs of the Ionian Isles has taken place in the House of Commons, to prove, we suppose, the unintermitted vileness of the United Ionian States since 1809, and their unfitness for a representative government half a century later. Such unwarrantable inferences are calculated to irritate and dishearten a generation educated under British superintendence. They might be supposed to have been framed for the use of the popular partics, drawn up in opposition to the Government. It is true that the Lisgaràs, Domenichinis, and Zervos*, impracticable, weak, and vindictive, may have found

* Lisgarà, the head of the annexionist party of Zante; Domenichini, of Zante, a landed proprietor; Zervo, residing at Argostoli, in Cephalonia.

access to municipal offices, and to the Parliament of 1850; but it is absurd and mischievous on this account to encourage in England the belief that Zante or any of the other islands resemble in character or conduct the lawless people of 1801, who occasioned the diplomatic mission of Neranzi to St. Petersburgh on the part of the terrified Senate. The anarchy described by Neranzi was the result of the sudden transfer of the Ionian Isles from the government and crafty policy of the Venetians to the management of three different powers in the course of three successive years. The senate, unable to govern, and protected only by the Ottoman Porte, despatched their envoy to the Emperor of Russia, to implore his interference. On this, Count Mocenigo, a native of Zante, in the Russian service, immediately appeared as High Commissioner and Plenipotentiary: his mission being, to organise a new Government, to extinguish the old institutions, and extricate the Islands from the frightful confusion into which they had been plunged by the treaties of the Allied Sovereigns.

The addresses and proclamations of Count Mocenigo and the report of Neranzi are still preserved in the archives of Corfu. These are the documents which have been used unsparingly by political writers, who have thought to find there evidence that the race described in them must be incapable of constitutional institutions. Neranzi's description of Zante in 1801 having again lately been cited in the debates of the House of Commons, we may appositely refer to the following extract of a letter written by a Greek gentleman, P. Soutzo, a subject of King Otho, inserted in Mr. Jervis's history, and copied from the Exis, an Athenian gazette, to show the condition of Zante in 1850. This forms a striking and remarkable contrast to the report of Neranzi, and the assassinations of 1801 in that island: - I write to you from Zante, which I 'reached a week ago: my object is to give you an account of 'an election to the Municipal Council of Zante, which, as you ' are aware, administrates the local affairs of this island con'jointly with the Regent.'

He then notices the feelings of the citizens as regards a union with Greece, and the views of the extreme party:

Three citizens forming part of this latter class, T. Lisgarà, George Crenderopulos, and Demetrius Macri, lately presented ⚫ themselves as candidates at the municipal election, and obtained the majority of votes. The British Government violated the law neither directly nor indirectly: it had recourse to no kind of compulsion whatsoever. If in the independent kingdom of Greece, a candidate for the House of Assembly had declared