Page:Christian Greece and Living Greek.djvu/178

 156 CHRISTIAN GREECE AND LIVING GREEK. observed the dull silence of slavery, and men like Chateaubriand in their writings awakened sympathy, drawing the hearts from the ruins of stone to the living ruins. It is impossible to understand how any one could look upon the cruel treatment of this people without being touched, how any one could wander without heartfelt pity among these oppressed unfortu- nates in a country where there is no stone with- out a name, no brook, no spring which has not been celebrated in poetry or history, where every ravine, every valley reminds one of great deeds and great men. Foreign wanderers on this soil voluntarily hoped for and dreamed of the resurrection of Greece. To many it ap- peared as if the jealousy of the powers, which regarded Turkey as a necessary barrier against Russia, delayed the day of Greece's liberty. Most of them, however, agreed with Korais that the intellectual activity of the Greeks would be the forerunner of this complete resurrection, and necessarily had to be. All travellers, even those who believed that the Greeks were so devoid of education and virtue that they could not understand and create a better political condition, deemed it cruel to see them condemned to everlasting slavery. Those