THE NEW EUROPE
THE GROWTH OF ANTI-VENIZELISM
in the future their only definite and distinctive programme in the resolute championing of neutrality at all costs. The Entente's mistakes in August, 1915, and the effectiveness and brazenness of German propaganda, had reinforced the Greek people's vague fears of the dangers attaching to intervention. The crowning misfortune, that the 150,000 Anglo-French troops Venizelos had relied on were not at Salonica at the critical moment, decided the majority of Greeks (and finally determined, according to a private admission, the King himself) against intervention and played into the hands of anti-Venizelist politicians and Germanophil generals. Add to this that half the Athenian press was now, for financial and party reasons, obliged to take subsidies from the open-handed baron, and it is easy to see how Greek opinion was converted. Once the proffered hand of friendship was refused, it was useless for the Entente to tap Greece lightly with the boxing-glove when Germany raised her mailed fist.
Germanophilism is not, however, the chief constituent of present Greek policy. No Greek paper has ever seriously proposed intervention on the German side. Not even the late M. Theotokis, the time-serving M. Ghounaris, or Herr Streit himself, has ever openly supported such a plan. The chief factor in recent Greek policy is anti-Venizelism pure and simple. Venizelos refused to contest the elections of 19 December, 1915, because he denied their legality and validity. With him half the Greek electorate abstained from the polls. The chance had come for Venizelos's battered opponents to raise their heads. The eminently honest and respectable ex-Premiers, MM. Theotokis, Rallis and S. Dhraghoumis, combined with the unscrupulously active Patras politician, M. Ghounaris, to return to power a fairly compact "National" party. Compact in practice, the party was complex in origin. A glance at the list of deputies shows that it was local influences that enjoyed a triumph over the Liberals' clear-cut policy. The great families — Mavromikhalis in Lakonia, Koumoundhouros in Messinia, and many more — led their fellow-provincials to the polls. The feudal vote in Thessaly and the Ionian Islands, the Turkish and Jewish vote in Macedonia, had their full weight. The whole policy of the "parish pump," which Venizelos cast away as impatiently as Cromwell his "bauble," revived in full force.
311
