ONE afternoon in the autumn of 1899, M. Clemenceau called on the Comtesse de Noailles in Paris. He had just returned from Athens, and from a holiday in the Levant. "Ah, and what are your impressions of Greece?" "Well, Madame, I am not going to talk of the grandeur of the Acropolis, nor do I intend to torment you with a lecture on archæology. I have been to see strange and picturesque lands, among them Crete. You will never guess, though, my most interesting discovery in the island, one more interesting by far than the splendours of the excavations. I will tell you. A young advocate, a M. Venezuelos Venizelos? - Frankly, I cannot quite recall his name, but the whole of Europe will be speaking of him in a few years." The story is one more proof of M. Clemenceau's penetration, for twelve years were to pass before the life of Venizelos was to become the history of Greece.

"1

The European public has observed Venizelos since 1910 -yet the average newspaper reader's impressions are kaleidoscopic and melodramatic rather than coherent; the great Greek has appeared at irregular intervals on the crest of some dramatic event rescuing the Greek monarchy, and inaugurating a national risorgimento; launching the Balkan League on its brief but meteoric course; appearing and disappearing in his historic struggle with King Constantine; conducting a revolution at Salonika; building up by imperceptible degrees the startling fabric of a new Mediterranean State; swept from power at the most astounding general election of modern times; and emerging in these last days from the retirement of an exile to guide again the destinies of his country at one of the decisive and most tragic moments of her history; and by the sole exercise of his gigantic moral authority against a victorious revolutionary faction, insisting on the surrender of East Thrace, and so making possible the armistice of Mudania and the Lausanne Conference, as the preliminary of an attempt to rebuild the fallen fortunes of the Greeks.

The justification or the condemnation of a statesman must lie in the total tenour of his political life, rather than in the varying aspects in which it may be regarded. To secure this general view we must begin far behind 1910 or even 1898— we must go back to the days of a boyhood and a youth spent in the shadow of Turkish tyranny.

1 Quoted, S. B. Chester, "Life of Venizelos,” p. 5.

Eleutherios Kyriakos Venizelos was born at Mourniés, a village not far from Canea, in Crete, on 23rd August 1864. He was the fourth son of his parents, and as his three brothers had died in infancy, great anxiety was felt for the safety of Eleutherios. For this reason two Mahomedan "hodjas" and two Greek priests prayed ceaselessly for two days before his birth.1 This anxiety probably prompted the choice of his romantic name, as it certainly did the curious ceremony that was peformed soon after his birth.

The boy was placed on a heap of sawdust by the side of the road, and not far from his home. Some friends of the family, who were in the secret, were concealed a short distance away. After a pause, they proceeded down the road, and expressed due astonishment at discovering the child by the way-side. Picking little Eleutherios up, the friends hurried to his parents, and solemnly explained to them that they had come upon him abandoned on the road. They added that as they knew that M. and Mme Venizelos were childless, they had brought him to them in the hope that perhaps they might choose to adopt the boy. This generous act the father and mother of Eleutherios expressed their intention of doing, and as the child lived and thrived, the neighbours said that unquestionably the device, a local custom to meet these very circumstances, had succeeded, and M. and Mme Venizelos had in this way successfully deflected their evil fortune.2

The elder Venizelos, a small merchant member of a family that had emigrated from the Morea after the rebellion of 1770, intended his son to succeed him in his business. For some years, up to the age of eighteen, Eleutherios worked in his father's office, until his remarkable ability attracted the attention of a family friend, M. George Zigomalas, the Greek Consul-General at Canea, who urged the elder Venizelos to send the youth to the University of Athens.3

The merchant yielded to the advice of his friend and the enthusiasm and importunity of his son. At Athens, Venizelos, who became an LL.D. in 1887, at the age of twenty-three, and was shortly after called to the Bar, laid the foundations of that profound knowledge of the history and geography of the Near East by the studies he has prosecuted throughout his

later life, a knowledge that was to constitute him the formidable foe of hostile experts at Paris in 1919 and 1920.

The political aspiration for liberation from the Turkish yoke and union with Greece was traditional in his family. The elder Venizelos took part in the great rebellion of 1866, and had been compelled to fly with his family to the Greek islands, where he spent some years (until he was amnestied in 1872), during which he acquired Greek nationality, a circumstance that his son was in after years to find valuable.

At Athens, Venizelos consolidated his boyish faith by his studies, and formed those wide views of the destiny of Greece to which he has dedicated his life. The idea of Hellenism, the ultimate liberation of all the Greek communities of Turkey that could be united in a single Egean State, has been his inspiration from the beginning, and where he differs from his political opponents of later years is that the aspiration of every generous-hearted Greek youth has been the life-long vision of this man of genius, who has worked always in terms of the larger world of unredeemed Hellenism, rather than for the "quiet time" that seems the summum bonum of most old politicians.

Venizelos returned in 1887, and for two years practised as a barrister in Canea, where he attracted great attention by the logical brilliance of his cases. At the same time he began to take part in local politics, and was elected a deputy to the Cretan Assembly in 1889, in time to take part in an insurrection, during which he had to fly to Athens.

During the nineteenth century Crete was the Turkish Ireland that eventually became an international question. Since 1821, when the Cretans took part in the Greek War of Independence, there had been constant risings, until, under European pressure, the Porte modified a previous semi-liberal experiment by the Pact of Halepa in 1878.

One great cause of trouble had been that the Cretan Moslems were of the same race as the Cretan Christians, and. like all such minorities, were intensely self-conscious. The Pact of Halepa gave the Christians a slight advantage. There was to be an annual assembly consisting of 49 Christians and 31 Moslems, freedom of the Press was conceded, and Greek was to be the official language of the law courts and the legislature. The provision that half the surplus revenue was to be spent on the roads and harbours of Crete promised a remedy to the complete neglect of the centuries of Turkish rule.

In 1889, after the rising to which I have alluded, a firman was issued repealing the Pact of Halepa and reducing the numbers of the Assembly and the proportion between Christian and Moslem. After the usual union with Greece had been proclaimed by the insurgents, a pacification was arranged by the Powers, and the Sultan appointed a Christian governor as an experiment. The discontent, however, continued, as the Christians sighed for the Pact of Halepa, and the Moslems resented the Christian governor.1

From 1889 to 1896 Venizelos was active in political life, endeavouring to construct a truly national Opposition to Turkish power. He had become leader of the Liberal party soon after 1889, when his maiden speech had been a protest against the accepted habit of forcibly ejecting the Opposition from the Assembly after a successful election ! "A party,' he said, "should not be founded solely on numerical strength, but it also needs moral principles, without which it cannot do useful work or inspire confidence."2 Such doctrines were startlingly paradoxical in the Cretan Assembly of those days.

In 1896, the stringent repressive measures of the Turkish Government against a further outbreak, in which Venizelos took an active part, caused such an exodus of Cretans to Greece, where national feeling rose to a sympathetic fever heat, that the British Government intervened and brought pressure to bear at Constantinople for a restoration of the Pact of Halepa. But the Christians were no longer satisfied with the privileges of 1878; they clamoured for union with Greece, which the Powers were determined to prevent at all costs.

It is at this point that we first catch a glimpse of M. Venizelos, not as a successful barrister nor as a straight shot among the Cretan hills, but as an imaginative statesman seeing an opportunity for a positive half-step forward. M. Caclamanos, then editor of the Asty, now Greek minister in London, tells the story:

"I was young, very young for the editor of a newspaper. The Cretan question had entered a new and acute phase. The concert of Powers suggested a hybrid solution, viz., a return to the famous Pact of Halepa. Greek hopes and aspirations were once more frustrated. We carried on a most violent campaign, without respite or indulgence, against the Government. We demanded union with the mother country.

1 Miller, "A History of the Greek People," pp. 103-4.

2 Kerofilas," Eleftherios Venizelos," p. 7.