beginning of time. The first outbreak was in Moldavia, the ancient Roman
province of Dacia which had been cut off from the Empire in the third
century. Since then, it had been a lost land, a sort of Atlantis, where
the people had continued to speak the old Roman tongue and still called
themselves Romans and their country Roumania. Here in the year 1821,
a young Greek, Prince Alexander Ypsilanti, began a revolt against the
Turks. He told his followers that they could count upon the support
of Russia. But Metternich's fast couriers were soon on their way to St
Petersburg and the Tsar, entirely persuaded by the Austrian arguments in
favor of "peace and stability," refused to help. Ypsilanti was forced to
flee to Austria where he spent the next seven years in prison.

In the same year, 1821, trouble began in Greece. Since 1815 a secret
society of Greek patriots had been preparing the way for a revolt.
Suddenly they hoisted the flag of independence in the Morea (the ancient
Peloponnesus) and drove the Turkish garrisons away. The Turks answered
in the usual fashion. They took the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople,
who was regarded as their Pope both by the Greeks and by many Russians,
and they hanged him on Easter Sunday of the year 1821, together with a
number of his bishops. The Greeks came back with a massacre of all
the Mohammedans in Tripolitsa, the capital of the Morea and the Turks
retaliated by an attack upon the island of Chios, where they murdered
25,000 Christians and sold 45,000 others as slaves into Asia and Egypt.

Then the Greeks appealed to the European courts, but Metternich told
them in so many words that they could "stew in their own grease," (I
am not trying to make a pun, but I am quoting His Serene Highness who
informed the Tsar that this "fire of revolt ought to burn itself out
beyond the pale of civilisation" and the frontiers were closed to those
volunteers who wished to go to the rescue of the patriotic Hellenes.
Their cause seemed lost. At the request of Turkey, an Egyptian army was
landed in the Morea and soon the Turkish flag was again flying from
the Acropolis, the ancient stronghold of Athens. The Egyptian army
then pacified the country "a la Turque," and Metternich followed the
proceedings with quiet interest, awaiting the day when this "attempt
against the peace of Europe" should be a thing of the past.

Once more it was England which upset his plans. The greatest glory of
England does not