hat King Constantine would have been guilty of a
dereliction of duty had he not, by exercising his indisputable
prerogative, given the nation an opportunity to reconsider its opinion.

Sophisms suited to the fury of the times apart, the whole case of M.
Venizelos against his Sovereign rested, avowedly, on the theory,
improvised for the nonce, that the Greek Constitution is a replica of
the British--a monarchical democracy in which the monarch is nothing
more than a passive instrument in the hands of a Government with a
Parliamentary majority.[12] It is not so, and it was never meant to be
so. The Greek Constitution does invest the monarch with rights which
our Constitution, or rather the manner in which we have for a long time
chosen to interpret it, does not. Among these is the right to make, or
to refrain from making war. That was why M. Venizelos in March, 1915,
could not offer the co-operation of Greece in the Dardanelles
enterprise officially without the King's approval, and why the British
Government declined to consider his semi-official communication until
after the King's decision. Similarly M. Venizelos's proposals for the
dispatch of Entente troops to Salonica in September, so far as that
transaction was carried on above-board, were made subject to the King's
consent. Of course, if the King exercised this right without advice,
he would be playing the part of an autocrat; but King Constantine
always acted by the advice of the competent authority--namely, the
Chief of the General Staff. In truth, if anyone tried to play the part
of an autocrat, it was not the King, but M. Venizelos. His argument
seemed to be that the King should acquiesce in the view {73} which a
lay Minister took of matters military and in decisions which he arrived
at without or in defiance of technical advice.

In this again, M. Venizelos appears to have been inspired by British
example. We saw during the War the responsibility for its conduct
scattered over twenty-three civil and semi-civil individuals who
consulted the naval and military staffs more or less as and when they
choose, and the result of it in the Gallipoli tragedy. We saw, too, as
a by-product of this system, experts holding back advice of immense
importance because they knew it would not be well received. The
Reports of the Dardanelles Commission condemned this method. But it is
to a precisely similar method that the Greek General Staff objected
with such determi