om denying the
charge, replied that they would be fully justified in arming themselves
against the hostile Reservist Leagues. In short, the capital swarmed
with conspirators, but the guardians of public order were powerless,
owing to the proximity of the Allied naval guns, ready to enforce respect
for the Allied flags under whose protection the conspiracy was carried
on. By this time the French and British detectives had usurped the
powers and inverted the functions of the police organs;[10] and the
French and {128} British agents, after fomenting those fatal differences
which divide and degrade a people, had developed into directors of plots
and organizers of sedition.

But, in spite of such encouragement, the capital--or, indeed, any part of
Old Greece--had never appealed to M. Venizelos as a starting-point of
sedition. He knew that only in the recently acquired and as yet
imperfectly assimilated regions--regions under the direct influence of
the Allies--he could hope to rebel with safety. His plan embraced,
besides Salonica, the islands conquered in 1912, particularly his native
Crete. In that home of immemorial turbulence his friends, seconded by
British Secret Service and Naval officers, had found many retired bandits
eager to resume work. Even there, it is true, public opinion was not
strikingly favourable to disloyalty; but the presence of the British
Fleet in Suda Bay had much of persuasion in it.[11]

Our diplomacy did not openly commit itself. Sir Francis Elliot still
nursed the hope of effecting a reconciliation between the ex-Premier and
his King. When, in August, a conference was secretly held at Athens
between M. Venizelos and a number of Cretan conspirators, the latter
carried back the depressing intelligence that British official sympathy
with their project lacked the necessary degree of warmth. And again, on
11 September, when the British Consul of Canea went over to Athens with
some of those conspirators, he was ordered by the British Legation to
stay there, so as to avoid any suspicion of complicity. This attitude of
correct reserve on the part of the British Foreign Office, however, did
not prevent the British naval authorities on the spot from working out,
in concert with the insurgents, a plan of operations under which some
chieftains were to invest the coast towns on the land side, while our
men-of-war patrolled the sea in their interest.[12]

{129}

France, on the other hand, made n