-

ance to gain time for the purposes of preparation; and the allies might at the same time be amused with propositions which would at once assert the honour of the Porte, and delay the appeal to arms, till its forces were ready to act. Accordingly, the Reis Effendi communicated to the British ambassador on the 8th November, and to the ambassadors of France and Russia on the 9th, the final resolution of the Turkish government, comprehended in three demands, viz:-That the allied courts should desist from all interference in the affairs of Greece; that the Porte should receive an indemnity for the loss sustained in the destruction of its fleet; and that the sultan should receive satisfaction for the insult which had been offered to him. To these demands the ambassadors, on the 10th returned for answer, that the Treaty of the 6th of July, which had not been annulled, forbade the allies to abandon the question of Greece; that the Turkish fleet gave occasion to the battle of Navarino, which destroyed every claim of the Porte to an indemnity; that the Porte had the less reason to expect satisfaction, as it had been informed in due time that an event such as that at Navarino might occur, if it did not listen to the counsels of moderation, or if it should be the first to attack.

All hope of accommodation seemed thus to be at an end; and as the demands of the Porte had been accompanied with a declaration, that, till they were complied with, all intercourse between it and the representatives of the three allied courts was to cease, the ambassadors prepared in earnest to leave Constantinople. The Porte, how ever, whose object now very clearVOL. LXIX.

ly was to gain time, and avoid, as long as possible, a step which bore so much the appearance of an open rupture, detained them till the beginning of December with new propositions, but all of them of such a nature as not to admit of serious deliberation. On the 5th of December, they intimated to the merchants that no hope any longer remained; and informed them, that, in all probability, there would be no impediment to their embarking, if they desired it, at the same time with the ambassadors, though it was not likely that they would be permitted to carry their property with them. The feeling of many of the merchants, on learning the state of affairs, was, that they ought to remain on the spot for the protection of their property. The Turkish authorities, on their part, manifested great anxiety to detain them, and a communication to some of the more eminent of them was even made from the Reis Effendi, who promised them security both of person and property, and further, that the English dragoman should be allowed to remain, in order to keep up, so far as commercial affairs were concerned, the usual communications with the Porte. The fears, however, of the majority of them were too strong to allow them to listen to any representations of this kind. The ambassadors left Constantinople on the 8th of December. On their departure, they were treated with the respect and courtesy due to their characters. On the day preceding their departure, another attempt was made to detain them, by a proposition, on the part of the Turkish government, to grant a general amnesty to the Greeks. This not being the sort of conces sion which the ambassadors were [Y]

instructed to require, it was not listened to. The Russian minister repaired to Odessa; those of Britain and France to the Ionian isles. The sultan might thus consider himself at war with the three greatest powers of Europe. He continued, with great activity, his military preparations; but, to all sensible men, his surest hope must have been found in the circumstance, that, if one of the three powers now united against him had been working, through a long course of neverchanging policy, to accomplish his ruin, the two others, though at present apparently the instruments of its ambition, were deeply interested in counteracting its designs.

While these events were taking place in Constantinople, and at Navarino, no occurrence of any moment happened on the continent of Greece. The fortresses of Na poli di Romania had been occupied by two leaders of the names of Grivas and Fotomare, who, hap pening to be rivals, as was by no means uncommon among their compeers, hazarded the security, and destroyed the peace, of the town by their incessant quarrels. The government, unable to induce them to give up the fortresses, had deserted the city. In the month of August a decree was issued, de claring all officers and soldiers who did not obey implicitly the orders of general Church, to be in a state of rebellion. The generalissimo, having received this decree, ordered Grivas to evacuate the fortress of Palamidi, leaving his younger brother in garrison in it with two hundred men, and Grivas returned a very submissive answer. General Church himself repaired to the camp at Corinth, now the centre of the military preparations of the Greeks. Nikitas and Coliopulo

still shewed themselves in western Greece, and in August and September, gained some advantages over detached bodies of Ibrahim's Arabians. But they were uniformly checked by the want of ammunition and provision; and they were unable to oppose any resistance to Ibrahim, when, a month later, he perpetrated the havoc which brought down upon him the vengeance of Navarino. "I only beg for cartridges," wrote Nikitas; "cartridges and bread and we shall have plenty of men."

The National Assembly had closed its labours on the 17th of June, after passing a decree authorizing their new president, Capo d'Istria, to negociate, if he could, a loan of five millions of crowns, part of it to be applied in paying the interest of the two preceding loans. But, after the disclosures of the preceding year, no man had the hardihood to bring it into the market. The committee on whom the government devolved, when the assembly separated, transferred its seat again to Egina; for, although, as already mentioned, the submission or promised submission of Givas, had in some degree restored Napoli to tranquillity, the committee declared it not to be a favourable spot for devoting their cares to the interests of the country. "The agitation still remaining," said they, "after such great disorders, and the fear of new disagreements, would engage almost the whole attention of the govern ment at Napoli." When they thus honestly confessed the weakness of their authority even in the seat of government, they could not be expected to exercise any control over the freebooters, who, under the Greek flag, carried piracy into every corner of the Levant. A

fleet they had, but that fleet did nothing: many of the vessels which occasionally joined it to fight a battle, were at other times pirates, or the abettors and partners of pirates. The government accepted of the interposition of the allies with joy, agreed to the proposed armistice, and recommended its religious observance to their subjects. But, in despite of it,jpiracy continued to increase to such a degree, that, in the month of November, the British government, by an order in council, adopted the strong measure of commanding his majesty's ships in the Mediterranean to seize every vessel which they should meet with at sea under the Greek flag, or fitted out and armed

at any Greek port, with the single exception of ships of war belonging to, or acting under the orders of, the persons exercising the powers of government in Greece. This order proceeded upon a statement, that his majesty had in vain applied for the prevention of the outrages which rendered the navigation of the Levant highly perilous to the Greek government that that government, however willing, was not able to repress them-and that, therefore, until a government should be established in Greece competent to put an end to these excesses, the most efficacious protection for commerce would be, to prevent any armed vessels bearing the Greek flag from putting to sea.

the parent state. The British minister, with a more strict adherence to the known principles of colonial and commercial policy, declared the resolution of Great Britain to reserve to herself the indisputable right of admitting foreigners to traffic with their colonies, on whatever condition she might herself think proper to ordain. His majesty, therefore, by an order in council, excluded the United States from the list of those foreign countries whose merchantmen should be admitted to the ports of British colonies being the only foreigners who had abused the privilege by an unfair treatment of British ships in

return.

The American executive, embarrassed by the weakness of their cause, or anxious, from the importance of the case, to remove the responsibility from themselves, laid the whole papers connected withthenegotiation before Congress, for its consideration and decision. In consequence of the report of a committee to which they had been referred, a bill was introduced into Congress, the effect of which was, from and after the 30th September, 1827, to close the harbours of the United States not only against British Ships proceeding from British colonies, but against those of all other nations bound from the colonies to the republic. It was in fact a non-intercourse act, excluding all the British possessions in the western hemisphere, the settlements on the coast of Africa, the Mauritius, Ceylon, New Holland, and Van Diemen's land, from all commercial communication with the United States, unless, on or before the 30th September, the British government should admit the extravagant

pretensions which America had set up to the colonial trade. It was necessary, said the committee of the senate, that the interdict should be universal in its prohibition against all persons, and in its application to all the colonies. The British order in council, indeed, excluding the United States from the colonies, had left open to them those of the British North American possessions; but that exception was intended only to serve the partial interests of Great Britain, by drawing from the United States to the harbours of Canada or Nova Scotia, the provisions required in the West Indies, and thus still supplying them to the islands in her own shipping. But if these ports were closed, as well as those of the colonies which would otherwise be supplied through them, then, as the colonies could not subsist without these articles, the American trade would be concentrated in some of the ports adjacent to the colonies, and would be carried on in American vessels; for, it was taken for granted, Britain would never attempt to intercept the trade between these intermediate ports and the colonies. By permitting the productions of the United States to reach the colonies either directly in foreign vessels, or circuitously through the British ports of North America, the United States would lose the carrying trade, and gain nothing in return; by closing their harbours against all vessels, whether British or foreign, coming from the British colonies, their productions carried in their own vessels, would find a ready market, their interdict would be felt, and the only operation of the British prohibition would be, to add to the pressure under which the colonies were already sinking.