A Conspicuous Statesman

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLIX, Issue 17, 23 April 1913, Page 4

A Conspicuous Statesman

The Prime Minister of Greece, Eleutheorios Venezelos, as famous a Figure Abroad as Any Statesman in Europe-

JN sending to London, as her representative at the conference to decide the issue of peace or war hi Europe, so conspicuous a. statesman as Elentheorios Venezelos. Greece proved how desperate was the extremity confronting her. she had to have Crete. jShe had to have isles in the Aegean. Site ipoveted the traditionally Greek portion pf the dominion of the Turk on ths European continent. The man who. mtarnates this policy, the most heroically Hellenic figure of his rice, is to-day the Greek Prime ?linister and her delegates! at the most exciting conference of diplomatists since the Congress of Berlin. Eleutheorios Venezeloii is hailed hy the faris Gaulois as a Cavour. To the Loui)on “World” he seems as great a genius as Disraeli- His mind conceived the existing alliance of the Balkan powers and jlis statesmanship made it a reality. He Remained, nevertheless, the irreconcilable figure of the hour, the one man whose iiims jeopardised the cause of peace. The explanation is found in the uncompromising Hellenism of the Prime Minister from Athens. His dream is a restored Hellas, a Greece using the tongue of Demosthenes in its purity, reigning over the arts in her traditional glory, and an 'Athens that shall be the intellectual capital of the world. So uncompromising is the spirit of the man —behind whom his country stands a solid block—that the between Greece and Turkey still rages, lie proclaims his country s purpose to fight it alone if the allies cannot uphold the land he rules. There are daily clashes in the field of war between Turk 'and Hellene. New and strange as is this name of HJeutheorios Venezelos in our western ■world, the Prime Minister has been for years as famous a figure abroad as any statesman in Europe. He is a scion, we read in the London “Times,” of one of the most ancient as well as one of the most gloriolis of the native families of Hellas. The Venezeloi trace their origin directly to the Florentine Dukes of Athens far back in the middle ages. They can- claim an authentic patron saint in that beautiful St- I’liilothea Venezela Who was beaten to death by the pashas {n 1589. Another ancestor of the Greek Premier was one of those children for whose loss the mythical Niobe wepther(self into a fountain. His progenitor? Were in charge of the great library or (Alexandria when it was destroyed by the. Caliph Omar. In a word, whoever Bays Venezelos in modern Greece uses a, symbolical expression for the whole Hellenic spirit. The Prime Minister’s family history is part and parcel of his count rv’s most glorious annals. It seems pdd that so renowned, so important, and ho gifted a character should remain so unfamiliar to the western hemisphere. However, the deficiency is easily supplied, in view of the columns printed respecting Eleutheorios Venezelos in the European P"' KS - .. ...

From hie earliest and most impressionable years, Eleutheorios— “the liberated One’—was tired with an enthusiasm for that ambitious revival of everything -Hellenic to which his powers are now consecrated. Even his vocabulary, we Tend, is infected with the indomitable spirit of his patriotism and lie never uses a word of Which the elassicality could be impeached. He talks the tongue of Demosthenes, of Isocrates and of Aleibiades. lie sedulously banishes from even the eohimns of the newspaper h“ inspires any expression that could corrupt the purity of the traditional tongue of the raee to which ho belongs. The

long ,subjection of the Hellenes to Turkish despotism, the influx of a Slav element and the years that have elapsed since the death of his great ancestor who led the original revolt against the Osmanli combine to drift the moot noble of all tongues from its moorings. Vene»elos ha.s changed all this. Even the

(signs over the barber shops at Athens would be perfectly intelligible now-, we read in the Vienna “Zeit,” to Plato himself.

The transformation wrought in the domain of linguistics through the genius of Venezelos is next to be effected in geography. The map must be Hellenised back to the great era of the glory of Athens when she reigned the queen of the Aegean. When Eleutheorios Venezelos was a mere lad, we read in the Vienna daily, imbibing his classical culture and the law at the University of Athens, his spirit raged within to see so many isles of the Aegean still under the sway of the Moslems. He was born on an island that had not long been freed when he came into the world —Cerigo. Here his father had taken refuge after a futile rising against the Turk on his own isle of Crete. To Crete young Venezelos repaired upon the completion of his studies. His Hellenic spirit soon set the whole island in a blaze. His name spread

all over the isles through the prominence of the part he took in the revolt that shook the Mediterranean some sixteen years ago. Eleutheorios helped to man the guns that then defied the warships of the powers. He remained for a whole day in the fortress of Cape Malaxa after a rain of shells from the squadron in the harbour had made it a furnace. He bled so profusely from a wound in the shoulder that he seemed dead. The episode made him the hero of Crete. Intense as he can become in his capacity as a Hellene, Eleutheorios Venezelos seems to the correspondent of the London “Chronicle” a mild, meek, silent Iperson. He peens myopically out of blue eyes through gold-rimmed spectacles and talks French easily. He acquired English and Italian early, but he patriotically refused to learn a word of Turkish. He i«s described by the Paris “Gaulois” as curiously unlike a modern Greek in having no branding pessimism

of temperament, no insinuating servility of manner, none of that “nearness” in financial transactions which makes so many of hie countrymen the Shylocks of the Mediterranean. It is well known that Venezelos has sacrificed a comfortable patrimony to his patriotism. During his days of power in Crete—where

he rose to the post of Premier—he lived in three room,? with but one servant. Id* has, it seems, the sublimely Greek meaner in gesture as well as in speech. One cause of his prodigious success as a political orator has been the purity and elegance of his diction. He held the deputies spellbound when he swayed his island home. Now that he has been transferred to the 'larger scene of Athens, he is heard by vast audiences, who literally gape at his elaEsicalitiee. Whatever importance Greece has attained in the Balkan crisis, observes the London “World,” is due to Venezelos. It deems him great as a statesman and great as a diplomatist, citing in proof the fact, confirmed by other testimony, that but for him the allies would never

have united against the Turk. “Wien the secret history of the past six months comes to be written, it will be found that to him, more than to any other statesman, belongs the credit of bringing the rival racial interests of the Balkan communities into harmony.” The qualities that enabled him to achieve the feat are moral. They comprise perfect integrity, among other things. That was demonstrated when, as head of the ministry at Athens, he dismissed venal collectors of customs mid contractors ■who starved the troops on decayed fruit. Then there was the efficiency of Venezelos- He found the navy on the b is pf a private boating club, shooting birds on a preposterous pretext of target practice. Venezelos made the little squadron effective with the aid of a British officer. The army was put under French officers and equipped, like the Bulgarian, with French guns. Venezelos was for a time minister of war, minister of marine and Premier at Athens.

Venezelos had the ill luck to displease the royal family of Greece. He regards liis own descent from a family of Florentine Dukes as equivalent to the genealogy of the oldest dynasty in (Europe, according to the gossip, perhaps unreliable, in French prints. His pride was offended by the cavalier attitude of the ipourt to native Greeks. The subjects of Jhe King of the Hellenes are not supposed to be the sort of material out of which courtiers and nobles can be made. They- laek polish and they lack the high tone —-that “I don’t know what” of which the Bourbons made so much. The King and the Queen welcomed distinguished foreigners and agreeable people to an intimacy denied the Greeks. Venezelos felt humiliated. From the hour of hiis first appearance at court he treated the sovereign with cold aloofness, returning fccorn with seorn. His patriotism could never for an instant be in doubt. At tone national election, Venezelos was returned at the head of the poll in over st hundred constituencies. He was (Greece. The King had to acknowledge hb obstinate fact and a feud which had Arisen was assuaged. There were moments when Venezelos seemed about to become King himself. Were the Greek Premier not pent up in the Balkans, suspects the Paris “Figd.ro,” he might have a career like Bisanarck’is. • He has the breadth of view, the iron will, the inspirational genius. He illustrates the truth that isles, when ■they- do not happen to be big, stifle the initiative of their denizens who are ’mediocrities. The man who is born a genius bursts out of hie island in a sort oj fury, like Paoli, like Bonaparte, like Venezelos- Eleutheorios Venezelos has the temperament of the genius escaped from a pent-up Utica into a world he means to conquer. He is full of strange furies, of poetical dreams regarding the future of his country. He rages nobly at the thought that Greece is not to get far more of the inheritance of the Turk than Bulgaria or Servia or (Montenegro. One should see him, declares our authority, howling, literally howling, before an assemblage of his countrymen at the mere suggestion that Greece is to be slighted in favour of another Balkan power. His arms are thrown to the sky, Ina eyes blaze, bis chest heaves. The man is a fighter, an irreconcilable, brave, fanatical. Yet with these traits our contemporary sees blended their very opposite, subtlety, diplomacy, restraint, and a rare insight into the timeliness of a course of action. He has dominated the peace conference at London through his personality and that, concludes our student of Venezelos, is a blend of the Bismarck and the Cavour with the saint find the prophet. The Balkan crisis will not end until the world has recognised a great personality in Eleutheorios Venezelos. Never does this man strut with a conscious greatness. He exploits and cultivates virtues typically Hellene, jiwt as Horatio, Hamlet’s friend, was antiquely Roman. Venezelos is the genius. He thinks the thoughts of Plato in the portico, of Alcibiades before Syracuse. He is rapt, juspired and in a noble way of the earth, as well. He comes out of .trances to address you but he wakes completely.