The Alaska daily empire., 1919-05-17
The Debt of Civilization to Greece.
Christian Science Monitor.)

ably respond after the manner of thar remarkable prime minister of England, the Duke of Newcastl" when they told him Cape Breton had be capturCd- Cape Breton is island! Wonderful! Show it to mt the map So it is, sure enough. My dear sir. you always bring erod news. I must go and tell the King that Cape T;retcn is island"
 Now, if the Duke of Newcastle had only had larger vison he might have seen the birth throes o a new comnlonwea tn in the capture ot Cape Breton And, in the way if the man in the street could throw his mind back twenty-five centuries, he would see Greece standing like a rampant across the path of Eastern invasion, and saving Western civilization its cuture long after it's sword had broken in its hand. It was on the plain of Morathon, of Marathon where the armies of Darius, seeking to breach the walls of Western civilization and overwhem Europe with the ideas of Persia sobbed back in the Aegean Sea- that Lord Byron first dreamed the dream Mir. Venizelos is dreaming today
 'The mountains look Marathon
 And Marathon looks the sea;
 And musing there an hour alone,
 dreamed that Greece might still be free"
 After Darius, Xerxes; after Marathon Salams; af- ter Miltiades, Thermstocles:-
 "A king sate on the rocky brow
 Which looks OCT born Salamis
 And ships, by thousands, lay below,
 And men in nations;-all were his!
 He counted them at break of day
 And when the sun set where were they?''
 Centuries passed. Alexander had entered Babylon and driven another Darius in headong flight before him. But civil wars and Roman arms had made a the Byzantine Empire in Constantinople. The cen ter of the Hellenic had shifted away from the great rock which Phdias' statue of Athena had geamed, to the shores of the Bosphorus, whilst Helenism had cast it's spell over Pontus and Cappa-
 
 erranean coast It was just here that there burst the cyclone out of the East,the armies and way into Europe. Mulhammed was more successful, than Darius. The last Christian service held under the great dome of St. Sophia Constantine fell in the breach by the gate of St. Momanus. His head flung between the feet of the bronze horse of the statue of the Emperor Justnian and the great Greek city given up to murder and plunder.
 With the fall of Constantinople the blight of Otto man ignorance and stagnation settled over the Hell lenic world Of all the many peoples who have ron in wi hn wi culture, the Turk the only who could and die learn nothing from it. From the moment he became master of the Greek became a mere helot The con tempt of George the First for the language of Shakes peare and Milton not complete than that Of the caliphs and pashas of Stamboul for the wisdom of Plato the thunder of the Homerc line, or the pathos and laughter of the drama of Sophocles and become a slave, Greek thought could not be held in chains Greek scholars fled into Italy the schools of Constantinople re-estabished under the shadow of Shepherds Tower And at a moment when the darkness of the medieval night was falling over Europe, the of the New Learning burst oi the clouds in the east and began to traverse the intel
 Just then, as the old Greece had saved Europe with her sword, now she saved Europe with her wisdom Florence became another Athens The shelves of the monastic libraries ransacked for Greek scripts The Rucella gardens took the place of tho Venice brought Greek texts from the east though they gold precious stones. The tide of schol from Oxford to study under Chalcondylas, and Po tian lectured daily from the pages of Galen Moro wonderful still learning that Greek tn, key to the glories of the New Testament, and tha the world need no longer be dependent the cor rupt texts of the old Latin manuscripts
 Meantime Greece not dead, but sleeping Afte, three centuries of this sleep the Greeks rebellion aided by the Russians. "The Sick Man O. Europe not, however. sick as he has since become. The rising cruelty and mercilessly crushed out It not until another half century had passed that the famous Tetaeria under the guise of literary society honeycombed the Hellenic worlt with veritabe labyrinth of secret societies and then taking advantage of the struggle which had suddenly blaEed up between the "old Lion of Janina the Porte. hurled all Helas into war of liberation. Al the struggle the great European powers found is increasingly difficult to keep out of it. forcing the world to recognize that the spirit oi Mtiades and Themstocles could not be crushed even to the phrase of Byron, by Turkish force and Latin fraud" And so, October day, in the year 1927 the combined squadrons of England France and Russia sailed into Navarino Bay and by sunset, the fleet Muhammed the Second suffered the fate oi that of Xerxes Almost two later by the terms the treaty Adrianople the unconquerable spirit of Greece regained its independence.
 Greece free, but how different a Greece from that of Miltiadas Themstocles of the the Byzantine Emperors The islands those names to conjure with, Crete of the Labyrinth, Rhodes of the Colossus Lesbos where Sappho sang, Samos birth place of Pythagoras, and Kos where the temple of Aesculapius stood, all these still Turkish So all Thrace and the city with the great church of St Sophia. So the rich port of Smyrna the founded church. Some of these have been recovered ty Greece in her effort be herself again But most or them she claims and rightfully claims today And mi ifV iS hat nf fn