Home life in Hellas, Greece and the Greeks - eBooks4Greeks.gr

156 HOME LIFE IN HELLASmatter. They are competent legislators, butindifferent administrators. The best-managedinstitutions are those due to private initiative.To the making of laws they attach far moreimportance than to their being carried intoeffect.A significantchange has come over the Greekspirit in one important respect. Formerly theyshared the common Oriental antipathy to Westerns.The term skylo frangho—dog of a Frank— is nowobsolete. The writer remembers hearing it oncemany years ago, not in Greece, but in Constantinople,from the lips of an ancient dame who for somecause had a quarrel with a European. The coconabrought her vituperative eloquence to a climaxwith that epithet, as being the sum of all that wasbase. Truly the Greeks had no cause to love theFranks, who stripped Constantinople of all itstreasures in 1204, ad majorem gloriam Dei, inthat barefaced freebooting expedition which wentunder the name of the Fourth Crusade. And it isopen to doubt whether the Turk was not an easiertaskmaster in Greece and the Archipelago thanFrank or Venetian. But the animus existed downto modern times. The Ionian Islanders werespoken of contemptuously as metrio franghi—halfFranks. Dr. Millingen, who was with Byron atMesolonghi in 1824, says in his Memoirs, theGreeks were averse from every plan suggested bythe Franks, against whom they nourished a hatredlittle inferior to that they entertained for Mussul-