arguing that the spoken language should become the basis of the national written language. "Language... is a means, not an end," he wrote, and should be judged on its effectiveness in conveying meaning and emotion. 'Vulgarity and impropriety' are properties of the content, not the language itself; and since even the lόgioi—the learned—are now accepting the use of demotic in poetry, it has proved capable of conveying even the most sublime concepts. "I believe," he continued, "that our modern language is a perfection of the ancient." For Konemenos, as for so many others, the language question had a patriotic and spiritual dimension. "All other nations have a present. We do not... By despising and renouncing our language, we are despising and renouncing our present." Two years later, Konemenos published Once More on Language, in which he answered his critics and developed his ideas. To those who complained that his prose did not sound like genuine demotic speech, he explained that he was trying to develop a 'de-regionalized' demotic. The supporters of Katharevousa had always maintained that the spoken dialects differed so much among themselves that it would be impractical to use demotic as a written language; Konemenos showed that there was more than enough common ground. "We don't have dialects, but we have idioms". As for the grammarians, instead of adapting their technical terms to describe the living language, they were trying to alter the language itself to make it conform to their outdated system, "chopping and squeezing the body" to fit the ancient clothes. Finally he gave a demotic translation of a text on international law written in archaic Katharevousa. Konomenos was one of the first to attempt this sort of exercise, which was to be repeated by other demoticists as late as the 1960s. Nevertheless, despite his energy and foresight, Konemenos' work had little immediate impact. Publishing in Corfu (rather than Athens) and working as a consul in Patras, he was perhaps too far from the political and cultural centres in Athens to be taken seriously. However, new political and cultural developments were soon to make Greece much more receptive to demoticist ideas. The Bulgarian Exarchate and the Eastern Question 1870–81 The first was the foundation in 1870 of the Bulgarian Exarchate, effectively an independent Bulgarian Orthodox Church, with services held in Church Slavonic rather than archaic Greek. A few generations earlier it had been possible to hope,