He saw no difficulty, convinced as he was, of erecting a Greek Empire on the remnants of Turkey. Every time that doubts were expressed to him, or he was shown data which should have moderated the positions, he denied the most evident things, he recognized no danger, and saw no difficulty. He affirmed always with absolute calm the certainty of success. It was his opinion that the Balkan peninsula should be, in the north, under the action of the Serb-Croat-Slovene State and of Rumania, and in the south of Greece. But Greece, having almost all the islands of the Aegean, a part of the territory of Turkey and all the ports in the Aegean, and having the Sanjak of Smyrna, should form a littoral Empire of the East and chase the Turks into the poorer districts of Anatolia.
In the facility with which the demands of Greece were accepted (and in spite of everything they were accepted even after the fall of Venezelos) there was not only a sympathy for Greece, but, above all, the certainty that a large Greek army at Smyrna would serve principally towards the security of those countries which have and wished to consolidate great interests in Asia Minor, as long as the Turks of Anatolia were thinking specially about Smyrna and could not use her forces elsewhere. For the same motive, in the last few years, all the blame is attributed to the Turks. If they have erred much, the errors, even the minor ones, have been transformed into crimes. The atrocities of the Turks have been described, illustrated, exaggerated; all the other atrocities, often no less serious, have been forgotten or ignored.
The idea of a Hellenic Empire which dominates all the coast of the Aegean in Europe and Asia encounters one fundamental difficulty. To dominate the coast it is necessary to have the certainty of a large hinterland. The Romans in order to dominate Dalmatia were obliged to go as far as the Danube. Alexander the Great, to have a Greek Empire, had, above all, to provide for land dominion. Commercial colonies or penetration in isolation are certainly possible, but vast political organizations are not possible. It is not sufficient to have territory; it is necessary to organize it and regulate the life. Mankind does not nourish itself on what it eats, and even less on what it digests, but on what it assimilates.