one manifestation of
returning vitality, and was ultimately due to the concrete economic
development with which it went hand in hand. The Greeks, who had found
culture in western Europe, had come there for trade, and their commercial
no less than their intellectual activity reacted in a penetrating way upon
their countrymen at home. A mountain village like Ambelakia in Thessaly
found a regular market for its dyed goods in Germany, and the commercial
treaty of 1783 between Turkey and Russia encouraged communities which
could make nothing of the land to turn their attention to the sea.
Galaxhidi, a village on the northern shore of the Korinthian Gulf, whose
only asset was its natural harbour, and Hydhra, Spetza, and Psara, three
barren little islands in the Aegean, had begun to lay the foundations of a
merchant marine, when Napoleon's boycott and the British blockade, which
left no neutral flag but the Ottoman in the Mediterranean, presented the
Greek shipmen that sailed under it with an opportunity they exploited to
the full. The whitewashed houses of solid stone, rising tier above tier up
the naked limestone mountainside, still testify to the prosperity which
chance thus suddenly brought to the Hydhriots and their fellow islanders,
and did not withdraw again till it had enabled them to play a decisive
part in their nation's history.

Their ships were small, but they were home-built, skilfully navigated, and
profitably employed in the carrying trade of the Mediterranean ports.
Their economic life was based on co-operation, for the sailors, as well as
the captain and owner of the ship, who were generally the same person,
took shares in the outlay and profit of each voyage; but their political
organization was oligarchical--an executive council elected by and from
the owners of the shipping. Feud and intrigue were rife between family and
family, class and class, and between the native community and the resident
aliens, without seriously affecting the vigour and enterprise of the
commonwealth as a whole. These seafaring islands on the eve of the modern
Greek Revolution were an exact reproduction of the Aigina, Korinth, and
Athens which repelled the Persian from Ancient Greece. The germs of a new
national life were thus springing up among the Greeks in every direction--
in mercantile colonies scattered over the world from Odessa to Alexandria
and from Smyrna to Trieste; among Phanariot princes in the Danubian
Provinces and th