The court itself is so corrupted by the vices and immoralities which always beset courts, that it does not rally to itself the small class of devoted patriots who cannot yet resign themselves to despair, and who find in a change of persons the possibility of a revival which they hope for rather than anticipate, while it offends every day more and more deeply the equally small class of honest and patriotic reformers of the Radical side in politics.

The mortally morbid condition of public feeling is shown, not in the fact that the Hon.

X.or Y.is an immoral man, but in that he is not in the least discredited by well-known immoralities which would banish a man from public life in England or America, and compared with which those with which Crispi was charged were trivial.
One cannot pronounce the same judgment on Greece and Italy.

The decay in Greece is economic and civic, poverty of resource and resources on one side, and on the other invincible insubordination, refusal in the individual to submit to discipline or sacrifice, the conceit of a dead and forgotten superiority which makes progress or docility impossible.
The measure of apparent renovation in Athens and some other points is owing to the influence and benefactions of the Greeks who have lived and prospered in other lands, where their natural mental activity has borne fruit, but the normal progress of the nation is so slight that it has no chance in the race of races now being run in the Balkans.
But the Greeks are preserved from a moral decay like that which threatens Italy by the domestic morality, due in part to temperament, but in part also to the influence of the clergy, who, if not scholars and wise theologians, are generally men of pure domestic morality and leaders of the common people.

The Orthodox Church is national, lives with and for the people, has no political ambitions, and cannot endanger the state.
In Italy the danger is other.