In reality they were striving to teach them elementary
geography, history, and politics. The Ulysses of the Conference, M.
Venizelos, first pilgrimaged to London, saying: "If the Foreign Office
is with Greece, what matters it who is against her." He hastened to call
on President Wilson as soon as that statesman arrived in Europe, and,
to the surprise of many, the two remained a long time closeted together.
"Whatever did you talk about?" asked a colleague of the Greek Premier.
"How did you keep Wilson interested in your national claims all that
time? You must have--" "Oh no," interrupted the modest statesman. "I
disposed of our claims succinctly enough. A matter of two minutes. Not
more. I asked him to dispense me from taking up his time with such
complicated issues which he and his colleagues would have ample
opportunity for studying. The rest of the time I was getting him to give
me the benefit of his familiarity with the subject of the League of
Nations. And he was good enough to enumerate the reasons why it should
be realized, and the way in which it must be worked. I was greatly
impressed by what he said." "Just fancy!" exclaimed a colleague,
"wasting all that time in talking about a scheme which will never come
to anything!" But M. Venizelos knew that the time was not misspent.
President Wilson was at first nowise disposed to lend a favorable ear to
the claims of Greece, which he thought exorbitant, and down to the very
last he gave his support to Bulgaria against Greece whole-heartedly. The
Cretan statesman passed many an hour of doubt and misgiving before he
came within sight of his goal. But he contrived to win the President
over to his way of envisaging many Oriental questions. He is a
past-master in practical psychology.

The first experiments of M. Venizelos, however, were not wholly
encouraging. For all the care he lavished on the chief luminaries of the
Conference seemingly went to supplement their education and fill up a
few of the geographical, historical, philological, ethnological, and
political gaps in their early instruction rather than to guide them in
their concrete decisions, which it was expected would be always left to
the "commissions of experts." But the fruit which took long to mature
ripened at last, and Greece had many of her claims allowed. Thus in
reorganizing the communities of the world the personal factor played a
predominant part. Venizelos was, so to say, a fixed star in the
firmament