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 THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE. 1 75 they wrote to the Czarina : " Set free the chil- dren of the Athenians and Lacedsemonians from the crushing yoke under which they groan, and which, nevertheless, has not been able to de- stroy the spirit of their nation, where the love of freedom still burns. Our chains have been powerless to stifle that love, for we always had set before our eyes the living memory of our heroic fathers." The two ideas to restore the Byzantine em- pire and to reawaken ancient Hellas became in- termingled. There was as much of the one as of the other in the minds of those who prepared the national movement in 1821. The poet Rhigas addressed his passionate appeal to every Christian in bondage "to light a fire which should wrap all Turkey, from Bosnia to Arabia." The Byzantine project was then not so vision- ary as it now seems. The spirit of nationalism had not been roused in the other races of the Balkan peninsula. They felt that they all were Christians. The other states might have united under the leadership of Greece to form one Christian state if the revolution had been better organized. If Ypsilanti had possessed the genius of a Wash-