Although strongly urged to do so, both by the King and by the political leaders, M. Venizelos refused to turn his Constituent Assembly into an ordinary Parliament, and proceed to the legislation made possible by the new constitution. Seeing clearly that durable and effective ministerial power could be derived only from the people and supported only by their intelligent good-will, he balked the intrigues of the politicians, and overcame the dynastic fears of the King. The Constituent Assembly was dissolved. M. Venizelos went before the people, travelling everywhere and explaining his program for the reformation of the country. The result was a triumph such as no man has ever received in modern Greece. In November, 1910, followers of M. Venizelos were returned in so overwhelming a majority that he could afford to ignore the Athenian politicians who saw in him a menace to their personal rule, their sloth, and their "graft."
Since that day M. Venizelos has been the idol of Greece. Never has trust in public man been more amply justified. Every administration of the State was completely transformed within eighteen months. Even to outline what M. Venizelos has accomplished reads like a fairy tale. Only those who knew the Greece before his arrival and are able to contrast it with the Greece of today can appreciate the immensity of his labours and the radical character of the changes he has made. I cannot dwell on the talent shown by this Cretan in matters of financial reform. But his military and naval reforms, and his foreign policy, have been so important in making possible the Balkan alliance and its successes that they cannot be passed over.
M. Venizelos, when he first came to Athens, saw what was the matter with the Greek military and naval establishments. Like Peter the Great and the Japanese, he realized that the Greeks must learn from Europe by submitting to European teachers. To persuade his fellow-countrymen, who have a very exalted opinion of their own ability (the Greeks are always sure they were born to command, without first having learned to obey!), that they must not only call in foreign advisers, but must submit to their authority, has been the most Herculean of the tasks this great man set before him. Article three of the new constitution had authorized the appointment of foreigners as officers of the Government and given them temporarily Hellenic citizenship. From England was asked a naval mission, from France a military mission, and from Italy officers to reorganize the gendarmerie. In Greece the foreign officers were able to accomplish more in eighteen months than the foreign "advisers" of Turkey had accomplished in many long years. This is no assertion of personal opinion. The facts of the Balkan War speak for themselves. Why is this? In Turkey, the foreign teachers have never been given any real authority, and have seen every effort they put forth nullified by the insouciance, self-sufficiency, and cursed apathy of the Turk. The Greeks, on the contrary, "became as little children," and lo! a miracle was wrought!
When foreigners who visited Greece within recent years read about the successes of the Crown Prince at Salonika and Janina, the assassination of King George, the mourning of the Greek people, and the hearty acclamation of King Constantine, the national hero, they could think back to less than four years ago when the Crown Prince was practically banished from Greece, after having been dismissed from his command in the army by a popular uprising, and when the portrait of the King was removed from every coffee-house in Athens. What is the cause of the complete revulsion in public feeling towards the dynasty? It is due to the common sense of M. Venizelos. He saw that the present dynasty was necessary for Greece, and that the Crown Prince must come back and take command of the army. In defiance of public opinion, he insisted on this point. This attitude was a bitter disappointment to many who imagined that M. Venizelos would be anti-dynastic in his policy. As a result of his success in reconciling the Greeks with their sovereign and his family, the sympathies of Russia and Germany and Great Britain were not alienated from the Greek people, as was rapidly becoming the case. Emperor William especially, whose sister is wife of the new Greek King, was so delighted with the success of M. Venizelos in rehabilitating his brother-in-law that he asked the Greek Premier to visit him at Corfu.
This visit of the former Cretan revolutionary to the German Emperor in April, 1912, was hardly commented upon by the European press. But epoch-making words must have been spoken in the villa Achilleion, for immediately after that visit the semi-official German press began to prepare the public for the events which were to take place in the Balkans. The eloquence and remorseless logic which had carried the day among Cretan insurgents and Greek electors was not lost on the "war-lord of Europe." Emperor William carried back to Berlin the conviction that no diplomacy could outwit the Greek Premier's determination that Turkey should disappear from Crete and Macedonia.
I do not think I am exaggerating in saying that when the Young Turks, by their insensate chauvinism, caused M. Venizelos to despair of saving Crete through Crete itself, they signed their own death-warrant. If they had refrained from their boycott and let Crete alone, would M. Venizelos have gone to Greece? I think not. It is one of those strange coincidences of history that on the very day when Mahmud Shevket pasha, in the Ottoman Parliament, declared that if Greece did not make a public statement to the effect that she had no intention at any time to extend her sovereignty over Crete, a million Turkish bayonets would gleam upon the plains of Thessaly, Eleutherios Venizelos was quietly leaving Crete for Athens.
To bring together Greece, Bulgaria, Servia, and Montenegro into an alliance which would drive the Turk out of Europe was in the mind of M. Venizelos as far back as the summer of 1909, when he saw the international fleet at Canea land marines to cut down the Greek flag which he had raised. It became an obsession with him. It was possible, because he believed it was possible. But no one else regarded it as more than an idle dream. The rare friends to whom M. Venizelos vaguely hinted that such an alliance was the only way of solving the Balkan question called it the "acme of absurdity." I quote the words of an eminent diplomat to whom this solution was mentioned. At the opening of the Italian War, when I suggested to the Turkish Grand Vizier that such an alliance was possible, he looked at me pityingly, and said, "The questions you ask display your ignorance of conditions in this part of the world. My time is too valuable to discuss such an impossible hypothesis. Go to Hussein Hilmi pasha, and ask him if he thinks the Greeks and Bulgarians could ever unite." Hussein Hilmi pasha referred me to every single book that has ever been written about the Macedonian question. "I do not care which you read," said the ex-Governor-General of Macedonia, "they all tell the same story."
But M. Venizelos was not asking himself, "Can I do it?" but, "How shall I do it?" Once more he saw clearly. The pan-Hellenic national ideal must be given up. Greece must content herself with Epiros, the Ægean Islands, Crete, and a slice of Macedonia west of the Vardar—possibly including Salonika, if the army proved as victory-winning as those of Bulgaria and Servia. Everything else must be left to Bulgaria and Servia. When first proposed to the leaders of Greece, this proposition seemed so preposterous that M. Venizelos was accused of being a traitor to Hellenism. He is still denounced by the fanatics, after all that he has accomplished. But patiently he built up his argument, using all his magnetism and his eloquence to convince his colleagues. He showed how Greece was being constantly humiliated and menaced by the chauvinism of the Young Turks, how the boycott was ruining Greek shipping, how Crete itself would gradually get to like independence better than union with Greece, and how inevitable it was that the Slavs should in the course of time come to possess Thrace and Macedonia. Instead of sacrificing everything to Bulgaria, he maintained, "this is our only chance to get any part of European Turkey. We must give up our ideal, because it is impracticable. With Bulgaria, we can crush Turkey. Without Bulgaria, Turkey will crush us. And if Bulgaria helps, we must pay the price." It may be years—not until archives are open to historians and memoirs of present actors are published—before everything is clear concerning the formation of an alliance which was as great a surprise to Europe as it was to Turkey. But the famous telegram which M. Gueshoff, Prime Minister of Bulgaria, addressed to his colleagues at Athens after the first successes of the war were won, is sufficient testimony to the essential part played by M. Venizelos in forming the coalition.