THE MEDITERRANEAN PEOPLES—FiSCHER. 515 
Tsakonia in the Peloponnesus and on a few islands can we find any 
pure descendants of the old Greeks, who are distinctly Greek in 
physical type. This is especially true of the women. 
The culture force in the Greeks, however, is out of proportion to 
their numbers. Compulsory education is unnecessary among a 
people where lazy children after fifteen absences suffer the disgrace 
of being excluded from attendance at school. 
In order to estimate fairly what the Greeks have accomplished in 
the last fifty or seventy-five years, we must take into account how 
long these people groaned under the Turkish lash, and also the fact 
that the struggle for freedom turned the country into a desert, and 
the people, it might almost be said, into a band of robbers. Even 
the language has been purified again. That the Greeks never retro- 
gressed in culture as far as the Bulgarians, for example, is of course 
to be attributed somewhat to the nature of the country, which may 
best be termed a maritime mountain country. For this reason the 
Turks were never able to subdue the people completely and perma- 
nently. The Greeks always held connections over the sea with the 
Christian occident and its culture. 
The sea stamps its characteristics on the Grecian landscape and 
upon its people. Their home is the sea-incised land of Greece and the 
shores of its archipelago, a section of the earth’s surface almost as 
large as Germany, but with hardly a fourth of the land. 
Everywhere in Asia Minor, from Cilicia and Cyprus to the Helles- 
pont and the Balkan peninsula, in Thrace, Macedonia, Albania, 
everywhere, the Greeks cling to the coast. Greeks are the freighters 
of the whole Mediterranean eastward from Odessa to Alexandria 
and to the west to Trieste, Malta, and Marseilles. For this reason 
they were indispensable to the Bulgarians as well as the Turks. The 
fishermen of the eastern Mediterranean from Syria to Tunis are 
Greeks. 
It is in Turkish territory in the adjoining part of Asia Minor that 
the Greeks are making especial progress. The Turks had everywhere 
taken the fertile land from them and made them the tenants of large 
Turkish landholders, but they have transformed the mountains and 
the poor ground into thickly settled garden tracts and have finally 
bought out the Turks in many cases. The number of their children 
is everywhere large, on account of their great domesticity and the 
purity of their home life, so that they have an incentive in this also 
for acquiring property and spreading out. 
The younger generation presses toward the mainland, especially 
from the islands, which have made up their enormous losses in the 
fight for liberty and are again thickly settled. Some are even over- 
populated, like Samos. Many Greeks seek their fortune in the great 
