8 Greek Conditions [1888 



in Frank Noel's father's time. Edward Noel had come to Greece soon 

 after the War of Independence in the year 1830, and had purchased a 

 good many thousand acres in the island, mostly mountain and forest 

 land, of a Turkish Aga, who was leaving the country on Eubaea being 

 made over to Greece. He had paid only £2,000 for the whole, and it 

 must be now worth, with its magnesia mines, ten times that price. 

 The value of land (Frank Noel tells me) is still rising, and agricultural 

 Greece is prospering. The peasants are everywhere purchasing their 

 holdings. They have few debts and are saving money. This is due 

 in part to the general advance of the country, in part to the abolition of 

 the land tithe for which a tax on yoke oxen has been substituted. The 

 peasantry round here are an excellent race, sober, hard-working, cheer- 

 ful, with many pristine virtues. Such is Frank Noel's testimony. 

 Eubaea, unlike the rest of Greece, is well wooded with pines on the 

 hillsides, and plane trees by the river banks. " I measured the largest 

 of these last while I was there and found it 53 feet in girth, with a 

 circumference round the extreme circuit of its boughs of 170 yards, 

 the finest single tree I ever saw, as it is perfect without break or blemish 

 more than a few bare twigs on the extreme summit." Returning by 

 road to Athens on 2nd December we slept a night at Chalcis and another 

 at Thebes. The journey was made in lovely weather and along a 

 carriageable road. At Chalcis they were talking of widening the 

 channel between the island and the main land, and of making of it a 

 large naval station for warlike purposes. To do it they will destroy 

 the old Venetian tower which is now a chief ornament. We heard the 

 details of this plan from Admiral Mansell, a fossilized English naval 

 officer who has inhabited Chalcis for the last twenty-five years. Both 

 there and at Thebes we were entertained by Greek friends of the 

 Noels. 



During the following days at Athens we enjoyed something of the 

 society of Edmund Monson, our Minister there, at the Legation, after- 

 wards Ambassador at Paris, and of Rennell Rodd, afterwards Am- 

 bassador at Rome, the latter a budding diplomatist with a small talent 

 for verse, but no great originality, as to whom I shall have more to 

 say in the course of this volume. All that I need quote from my 

 journal is that on the 3rd December I had an hour's interesting talk 

 with the then Prime Minister, Tricoupi, on Greek politics, and the 

 ambitions developed later in the direction of territorial expansion at 

 the expense of Turkey. 



" yd Dec. — Tricoupi is a hard-headed man without any special 

 graces of manner, but he talks straightforwardly and to the point. We 

 discussed finance, agriculture, road making, free trade, peasant pro- 

 prietorship, debts public and private, the shipping trade, the Corinth 

 Canal, and, lastly, foreign politics and Greece's prospects in the Ot- 



