ir hereditary skill in
lawless warfare. Not till January, 1822, was Ali forced to surrender,
and then only, perhaps, through the defection of the Suliots.

The Suliots, dissatisfied with Ali's recompense for their services,
had gone over to the Greeks, who, not caring to serve under Ali in his
rebellion, had welcomed that rebellion as a Heaven-sent opportunity
for realising their long-cherished hopes. The Turkish garrisons in
Greece being half unmanned in order that the strongest possible force
might be used in subduing Ali, and Turkish government in the peninsula
being at a standstill, the Greeks found themselves in an excellent
position for asserting their freedom. Had they been less degraded than
they were by their long centuries of slavery, or had there been some
better organization than that which the purposes and the methods of
the Friendly Society afforded for developing the latent patriotism
which was honest and wide-spread, they might have achieved a triumph
worthy of the classic name they bore and the heroic ancestry that they
claimed.

Unfortunately, the Friendly Society, already degenerated from the
unworthy aim with which it started, now an elaborate machinery of
personal ambition, private greed, and local spite, the willing tool of
Russia, was master of the situation. The mastery, however, was by no
means thorough. The society had dispossessed all other organizations,
but had no organization of its own adequate to the working out of
a successful rebellion. Its machinery was tolerably perfect, but
efficient motive-power was wanting. Its exchequer was empty; its
counsels were divided; above all, it had alienated the sympathies of
the worthiest patriots of Greece. Finding itself suddenly in the
way of triumph, it was incapable of rightly progressing in that way.
Obstacles of its own raising, and obstacles raised by others, stood
in the path, and only a very wise man had the chance of successfully
removing them.

The wise man did not exist, or was not to be obtained. Perhaps the
wisest, though, as later history proved, not very wise, was Count John
Capodistrias, a native of Corfu. Born in 1777, he had gone to Italy to
study and practise medicine. There also he studied, afterwards to put
in practice, the effete Machiavellianism then in vogue. In 1803 he
entered political life as secretary to the lately-founded republic
of the Ionian Islands. Napoleon's annexation of the Ionian Islands in
1807 drove him into