Note 72 — Chapter XI · AMERICANS IN TURKEY, THEIR WORK AND INFLUENCE.

Unhappily there are some who can see nothing but bigotry and mistakes in what the missionaries have done. Such characters are to be found among all races, as the following extract shows:

“It might be thought that here, [Missilonghi] on the spot where he [Byron] breathed his last, malignity would have held her accursed tongue; but it was not so. He had committed the fault, unpardonable in the eyes of political opponents, of attaching himself to one of the great parties that then divided Greece; and though he had given her all that man could give, in his own dying words, ‘his time, his means, his health, and, lastly, his life,’ the Greeks spoke of him with all the rancour and bitterness of party spirit. Even death had not won oblivion for his political offences; and I heard those who saw him die in her cause affirm that Byron was no friend to Greece.”—Stephens, Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1839.