1885, I came to save Greece

Chapter 176 The Silent Trial

The next morning.

After enjoying a hearty breakfast, Vice Speaker De La Garcez happily boarded his carriage and headed to Parliament.

Everything is under control.

He had already prepared his new topic for today—"A study on the judicial complexity of land reclamation procedures after farmers default on loans," a topic that would keep his team occupied for another three days.

As the carriage passed through Constitution Square, he saw newsboys waving today's newspapers wildly, and crowds surging toward the newsstands like a tidal wave.

He smiled slightly, assuming it was one of his own newspapers that had produced some "shocking" economic analysis.

However, when he arrived at Parliament and entered his lounge, his secretary rushed in, pale-faced, holding a newspaper.

"Speaker...you...you look!"

De La Garcías frowned as he took the newspaper.

That wasn't any newspaper he controlled, but the Athens Daily Telegraph, the largest-circulation newspaper in Athens and known for its neutrality.

Today's newspaper has only one shocking headline on its entire front page.

The Cry of Thessaly

Below the title, there is no editorial, no commentary, only the opening of a serialized story.

The story doesn't use any strong language; it simply uses a plain, cold, and even cruel style to faithfully record what the "Light of Hope" aid team saw and heard in an ordinary village in Thessaly.

The protagonist of the story is an ordinary tenant farmer.

His elderly father was seriously ill, coughing terribly. Doctors from the royal aid team arrived and offered to treat him free of charge.

But he refused in fear.

He begged the doctor to leave quickly because if the landowner knew that his family had accepted the "favor," it would mean that his family had "hidden money," and after the autumn harvest, they would be charged an unprecedented "gratitude tax."

To avoid being taxed more, he could only watch helplessly as his father slowly succumbed to death in agony.

The story ends here.

At the end, only a cold, emotionless narration was added.

"This elderly man named Spyros stopped breathing two weeks ago on a cold morning. He died without receiving any medical treatment."

De La García's breath hitched.

He felt a chill run down his spine from his tailbone to the top of his head.

This is not over yet.

Beside the story was a huge photograph that took up half the page.

In the photograph, the desperate young tenant farmer stands before his dilapidated hut. His back is hunched, his eyes are empty and numb, and his face bears the marks of life and fear repeatedly crushing him. In the dark hut behind him, a dying figure can be vaguely seen lying on the ground.

In another corner of the newspaper, a small photograph was cleverly placed side by side.

That was De La García himself.

In the photo, he is dressed in a gorgeous suit, holding a wine glass at a banquet to welcome the aid team, his face glowing and his smile beaming.

The two photos depict a scene of hell on earth and a picture of peace and prosperity.

They are placed side by side without a single word of explanation, yet they form a silent contrast that is more powerful than any words.

"Bang!"

The coffee cup slipped from De La Garce's hand and shattered on the expensive carpet.

He knew that Constantine's counterattack had begun.

This newspaper was snapped up in Athens.

It was reprinted three times within an hour.

People passed it around on the streets, in cafes, and in factory break rooms.

The literate people read the heartbreaking story aloud to their illiterate coworkers and citizens.

Whenever the story of the young man refusing treatment out of fear of a "gratitude tax" is told, the crowd erupts in suppressed anger and curses.

A dark, heavy anger began to silently gather in every corner of the city.

This is just the beginning.

From that day on, The Daily Telegraph and several other major newspapers, as if by prior arrangement, began to serialize a new tragic story from the Thessalian plain on their front pages every day.

The next day, the newspaper told the story of the young tenant farmer who was beaten to death by the landlord's steward for trying to protect his wife's last bit of food. Next to the story was a photograph of him lying in a pool of blood, with his wife silently screaming beside him.

On the third day, the newspaper told the story of a family whose daughter had been forcibly taken away by a landlord's private armed force. In the photo, the elderly mother with white hair was kneeling on an empty village road, stretching out her withered hand into the distance.

On the fourth day, the newspaper reported on the children who had starved to death by the roadside. In the photo, a girl who was so thin she was just skin and bones was huddled in a corner, clutching a piece of grass she couldn't swallow.

Each story is accompanied by an irrefutable photographic evidence taken by the aid team's photographer.

These stories and photos are like precise scalpels, cutting once a day, precisely piercing the softest and most vulnerable parts of people's hearts.

They did not incite or call to action; they simply stated the facts calmly.

But this calm is more powerful than any impassioned slogan.

It laid bare the greed, brutality, and hypocrisy of the landowning class, exposing them raw and naked to all the Greeks.

The series has entered its fifth day.

When the front page of the newspaper published a photo of a landowner's private army pointing bayonets at a weeping mother and snatching the last bag of flour from her arms, public opinion in Athens was completely ignited.

Constitution Square.

The gathered crowd, looking at the photos in the newspaper, fell into a deathly silence.

Then, someone, I don't know who, was the first to crumple up the newspaper in their hand and slam it hard against the iron gate of the parliament building.

This action is like a signal.

The next second, tens of thousands of people erupted in a roar that had been suppressed for days, like a volcanic eruption.

"Murderer!"

"Traitor to the nation!"

"Hang Dragases!"

They are no longer satisfied with angry shouts; they need action.

Stavros and his core union members fought with all their might to build a fragile human wall between the crowd and the parliamentary guards.

But they knew that this wall could collapse at any moment.

Inside the Parliament building.

De la Garcías sat in his office, able to clearly hear the deafening roar outside his window.

His face was no longer pale, but ashen.

His carefully constructed parliamentary defenses crumbled in the face of Constantine's relentless media offensive.

He finally understood that Constantine's previous silence was neither a sign of retreat nor confusion.

Instead, they are waiting.

The wait is for these "fish" to all jump into the quagmire of parliament, to put on a show, and to expose their ugliest and most greedy sides to the sunlight without reservation.

Then, with the sharpest pen and the most brutal lens, he painted an undeniable portrait of each of them, nailed to the pillar of historical shame.

Constantine didn't even need to get involved himself.

He simply presented the facts to the people.

The people will finish the rest for him.