itation, mixing themselves up in
party disturbances, carrying out open perquisitions and clandestine
arrests, and preparing the ground for graver troubles in the future.[16]

The representatives of the Entente at Athens pursued these unedifying
tactics in the firm conviction that the cause of M. Venizelos was their
cause; which was true enough in the sense that on him alone they could
count to bring Greece into the War without conditions. As to the
Entente publics, M. Venizelos was their man in a less sober sense: he
kept repeating to them that his opponents under the guise of neutrality
followed a hostile policy, and that his own party's whole activity was
directed to preventing the King from ranging himself openly on the side
of the Central Powers. The Entente Governments, whatever they may have
thought of these tactics and slanders, did not dream of forbidding the
one or of contradicting the other, since the former aided their client
and the latter created an atmosphere which relieved them from all moral
restraints.

They only upbraided M. Venizelos gently for keeping out of Parliament.
So M. Venizelos, seeing that he had gained nothing by abstention and
forgetting that he had {94} pronounced the Chamber unconstitutional,
obeyed. Early in May, two of his partisans carried two bye-elections
in Eastern Macedonia, and the leader himself was returned by the island
of Mytilene. Three seats in Parliament could not overturn M.
Skouloudis; and it cannot be said that his re-appearance on the scene
enhanced the credit of M. Venizelos with the nation. Ever since the
landing of the Allies, and largely through their own actions, his
prestige in Greece declined progressively. He was reproached more and
more bitterly for his "invitation" to them; and these reproaches grew
the louder, the closer he drew to the foreigners and the farther he
diverged from his own King. In a letter from Athens, dated 24 May,
occurs the following passage: "Venizelos becomes every day more and
more of a red republican. How that man has duped everybody! We all
thought him a genius, and he simply is an ambitious maniac."

Later on M. Venizelos explained why he had not already revolted. A
revolution there and then, no doubt, would have saved a lot of trouble;
"But before the idea of revolution matures in the mind and soul of a
statesman, there is need for some evolution, which cannot be
accomplished in a few moments," he said. Since October, th