Excerpt from the speech of Eleftherios Venizelos on 12/5/1930 to the people of Thessaloniki, published in 'Eleftheron Vima' two days later.
The great Cretan politician, in a period of recollection and internal reconstruction, summarizes a hundred years of free life in his personal way.

...To make you empathize with my deep confidence in the future of Greece, I would like you to compare two dates from our history: February 1830, when the Protocol of London was signed, which recognized our Independence, and February 1930, a hundred years later. In 1830, when Hellas was recognized as an independent state and emerged from a ten-year struggle, it was a desert of debris and its creation, one could say, was a political nightmare. Its viability was doubted by those summoned to the throne of Hellas Prince of Coburg, who refused for this reason to accept it since they did not agree to expand its borders. You well know that when it returned to independence, the population of Greece was approaching 700,000, one ninth of what it is today [1930]. No city worthy of that name existed anywhere in Greece. The city of Athens was a big village of 10-12 thousand people. Piraeus was wholly uninhabited: it had only three huts. So as I have said, while the conditions under which this small state was created, rendered its development doubtful, while its resources were not worth mentioning, and its political experience very small, and its romantic absorption in the Great Idea was all-encompassing - I say romantic because for one moment, when the Sultan died in Constatinople, the first King called the minister of the Navy and told him to prepare a war-ship, the only one that Hellas owned, because he wanted to sail to Constatinople to claim the inheritance of our fathers... For this reason I called our devotion to the Great Idea romantic. It was one of the causes of our continuous malady. This absorption did not permit us to seek the formation of a modern state that would have a serious chance of one day pursuimg the implementation of the Great Idea. While the conditions of life in this state were so unfavourable, nevertheless we see that this political nightmare managed to survive, to develop and to have today a territory three times as big, a population nine times bigger, and a wealth a hundred times or more greater, and to possess an honourable place in the family of civilized peoples... If by today we can achieve such development in just a hundred years, who could doubt that we can achieve more new developments in our second century of independent life, on which we now embark as a nation, having made great strides not only in the field of peaceful competition, but also of friendly co-operation with other peoples? New developments, which few of us can even imagine today?