Mysticism apart, during the sad period preceding his departure, the affection of the masses for their sovereign, intensified by compassion, had assumed the quality of veneration. Now that he was gone, they brooded over the wrongs which had driven him, a lawful and popular king, into exile: wrongs which suffered for their sakes enhanced his claims on their loyalty. They remembered wistfully the splendour of his victories, his manly courage, his saintly patience, and perhaps most of all his unfailing kindness to the humble and the weak. This was the quality which drew men most strongly to Constantine, and the absence of which repelled them most from M. Venizelos.[2] The experience of the last three years had helped to emphasize the contrast: when the Eagle's Son was up above, there were few vultures in the land; now there were vultures only. So the name of Constantine became a synonym for orderly government, loyalty to his person was identified with the principle of liberty, and the people who had never regarded Alexander as anything more than { 220} a regent, who cried after the departing monarch from the shore at Oropus: "You shall come back to us soon," hailed the return to normality as presaging the return of the legitimate sovereign as well as of a legal Constitution.
This, however, was the very last thing the powers that were contemplated even as a remote potentiality. For them the monarch in exile was dead; and the sooner his memory was buried the better. Accordingly, a police circular, issued on 26 May, prohibited conversations favourable to the ex-king, pictures of the ex-king, songs in honour of the ex-king, cheers for the ex-king. And, these regulations having been found insufficient to curb royalist fervour, five days later M. Venizelos demanded and obtained from Parliament the re-establishment of martial law, on the ground that "talk about the return of the ex-king was calculated to excite public feeling; and then the Opposition might have cause to blame the Government for not respecting the freedom of elections." The question of the ex-king, he argued, was utterly irrelevant to the forthcoming contest: the people would not be called upon to elect a Constituent, but merely a Revisionist Assembly: "Who has said there is to be a Constituent Assembly?" he asked.