triumphal progress.
The train moved slowly between lines of peasants who, their hands linked,
accompanied it, shouting: "We have wanted him! We have brought him
back!" [3] When {228} the King stepped out at the station, officers
fought a way to the carriage with blue and silver dressed postillions
which waited for him and the Queen. He had to keep tossing from one hand
to the other his baton, as men and women pressed upon him for a
handshake. The carriage struggled forward, men and women clinging to its
steps and running with it, trying to kiss the hands and feet of the royal
pair, and baulked of this, kissing even the horses and the carriage
itself. All the way dense masses of people pressed round the carriage,
shouting: "He has come!" or singing the chorus, "Again our King will draw
the sword." An eye-witness had a vision of a soldier who, amid cries of
"We will die for you, Godfather!" clambered into the carriage head first
and fell to kissing the knees of the King and Queen, while around people
fainted and stretchers pressed through the crowd.[12]

And so the fight for the soul of Greece ended in a victory for
Constantine.

The character of this prince has been painted in the most opposite
colours, as must always be the case when a man becomes the object of
fervent worship and bitter enmity. But the bare record of what he did
and endured reveals him sufficiently. His qualities speak through his
actions, so that he who runs may read. His most conspicuous defect was a
want of suppleness--a certain rigidity of spirit which, when he
succeeded, was called firmness, and when he failed, obstinacy. Yet the
charge so often brought against him, that he allowed himself to be misled
by evil counsellors, shows that this persistence in his own opinion did
not spring from egoism nor was incompatible with deference to the
opinions of others. It arose from a deep sense of responsibility: he
stubbornly refused to deviate from his course when he believed that his
duty to his country forbade deviation, and he readily laid down his crown
when duty to his country dictated renunciation. For the rest, a man who
never posed to his contemporaries may confidently leave his character to
the judgment of posterity.

As for M. Venizelos, history will probably say of him {229} what it has
said of Themistocles: Though he sincerely aimed at the aggrandizement of
his country, and proved on some most critical occasions of great value to