More than Serbians, Rumanians, and Bulgarians, have the Greeks been victims of this policy. For the triumph of Hellenism would have meant not simply the detachment of outlying provinces but a blow struck at the heart of the Ottoman Empire. The Greeks have never had a fair chance, either by themselves or in alliance with the other Balkan peoples, to work out their own salvation. At times the great powers have intervened directly; on other occasions they have aimed to keep the Balkan peoples weak by setting them against one another. For a hundred years it has been a game of bullying, bribing, fishing in troubled waters.
Venizelos was born and won his spurs in Crete under the Ottoman yoke. He was a leader in revolutions, and his first experiences with European diplomacy convinced him that the powers were determined, for the sake of their own interests, to keep his native island under Ottoman sovereignty. He left Crete and entered into the political life of the little kingdom of Greece to make the kingdom a Piedmont for the unification of Hellas. The Venizelist movement from the beginning, therefore, was not interested primarily in the internal affairs of independent Greece. The Venizelists set out to regenerate and strengthen the Kingdom of Greece for the purpose of using Athens as the starting-point in a campaign to emancipate the Greeks still under the Ottoman yoke. It is impossible to call Venizelos an imperialist, who conceived grandiose schemes and wrecked his country trying to put them through. The Kingdom of Greece was not “his country.” Of the 7,000,000 Greeks in the coast-lands and islands of the Ægean, hardly more than a fourth were inhabitants of the kingdom of Greece. The movement to which Venizelos gave his name was a movement to liberate as many as possible of the 5,000,000 Greeks still under Turkish rule, beginning with his own island of Crete.
The ideas of King Constantine and his great premier were radically antagonistic; they could not be reconciled. Constantine accepted joyfully the partial liberation that came through the Balkan wars at the beginning of his reign. But he looked upon his kingdom as a country whose internal interests were paramount. His policy during the war was to steer Greece through difficult years by maintaining neutrality. The policy of Venizelos was to involve Greece in the war on the side of the enemies of Turkey in order that, as a result of their victory (in which he believed implicitly), Greece might be enabled to free as many as possible of the Greeks still under the yoke of Turkey. When the Allies deposed King Constantine in 1917, Venizelos brought Greece into the war to fight for the redemption of the Ottoman Greeks and the completion of the unification of the nation.