M. Venizelos repelled these imputations, protesting that his movement was no way directed against the Prince. Yet it resulted in the departure of the Prince: the Powers who went to Crete to restore order entered into relations with the rebels; the manner in which these intimacies were carried on and the decisions to which they led made the Prince's position untenable, and he gave up his Commissionership in 1906. Likewise M. Venizelos affirmed that he had not stirred up an insurrection, but only headed a spontaneous outbreak of popular discontent. Yet even after his triumph he failed, in the elections of 1907, to obtain a majority.[27]
The Therisos performance in every point--plot and staging, methods and motives--was a rehearsal for the Salonica performance. Would the denouement be the same? This question taxed M. Venizelos's dialectical dexterity very severely.
At the outset he repudiated as a monstrous and malicious calumny the common view that his programme was to march on Athens and to dethrone the King. His movement was directed against the Bulgars, not against the King or the Dynasty: "We are neither anti-royalist nor anti-dynastic," he declared, "we are simply patriots." Only, after the liberation of Greece from the foreign invaders, her democratic freedom should be assured by a thorough elucidation of the duties and rights of the Crown--a revision of the Constitution to be effected through a National Assembly.[28]
So spoke M. Venizelos at the outset, partly because the { 137} Allies, who did not want to have civil war in the rear of their armies, bade him to speak so,[29] and partly because he wished to give his cause currency by stamping upon it the legend of loyalty. He realized that for the present any suspicion that he wished to embark on a campaign against King Constantine would be fatal, and by declaring war only against the Bulgars he hoped to entice patriotic citizens anxious to help their country without hurting their sovereign. But when time proved the futility of these tactics, the same M. Venizelos avowed that his programme was, first to consolidate his position in Macedonia by breaking down resistance wherever it might be encountered, and then, "when we had gathered our forces, we meant to follow up our work, if need be by arms, on the remainder of Greek territory." If he had not given an anti-dynastic character to his enterprise, that, he naïvely explained, was "because the Entente had been good enough to promise me their indispensable aid under the express stipulation that the movement should _not_ be anti-dynastic." However, the error was not irreparable: "After victory, grave internal questions will have to be solved," he said. "King Constantine, who has stepped down from the throne of a constitutional king to become a mere party chief, must accept the consequences of the defeat of his policy, just as every other defeated party chief." [30]