THE TROUBLES IN CRETE. 639 consuls, and it was announced that the constitution outlined in the Convention of Halepa would be restored in its entirety. At thesame time the Sultan gave it to be understood that he would grant any further reforms recommended by the Powers. The most pressing need was thatof a gendarmerie to preserveorder between the contending factions in the island. The ambassadors were anxious to have a foreign gendarmerie organised under an officer of rank taken from some European army. The Sultan made a hard struggle for the retention of the Turkish gendarmes, and the ambassadors themselves were divided on the point of who was to command the proposed new force. England hadoffered the services of Major Bor, who had had considerable experience of police duties in the East,but Russia and France threw obstacles in the way of the appointment of a British officer.

While thePowers were thus divided on points ofdetail,the Sultan took full advantage of their dissensions, and the Turkish authoritiesin the island threw every obstacle in the way of the practical workingof thenew Constitution. The Assembly was allowedonly to discuss the situation and make proposals that had no effect in changinganything. At the same timeit is only fair to add that many of the Greek leaders of the agitation were no more anxious than the Turks themselves for a settlement on the lines of the Convention of Halepa. They did not want a mere system of Home Rule under the Crescent. What they aimed at and worked for was the expulsionof the Mohammedans and the union of Crete with the Greek kingdom. So the smouldering civil war blazed out again, nowhere,now there. The Turks were closely blockaded by bands ofChristians in variousparts of theisland, the CretanMoslems wereforced to take refuge with their wives and families in the fortified towns, and there was a great insurgent camp on the rocky heights of the promontory of Akrotiri between the harbour of Canea and Suda Bay.

There wasrenewed bloodshed in the streets of Canea in the first days of February, 1897, and most of the Christian inhabitants either took refuge on board the foreign war-vessels, or fled to the camp at Akrotiri. At Rethymo the -Mohammedans plundered the houses of the Christians and refused to allow them to leave the town, wishing tohold them as hostages for theMoslems who were besieged in the interior. Berovitch Pasha, the Christian governor of the island,finding his power a mere name, had left Canea and taken refuge onboard of the flagship of the Russian admiral, and authority in Crete was representedonly by the Turkishcommander of the garrison and a kind of committee of foreign consuls and admirals, who were now exerting themselvesto keep the Mohammedans and Christiansfrom killing each other, and had received the order of their Governments to preventeitherparty fromreceiving succour from abroad. Tlae " concert ofEurope"— to use the phrase of the time— was striving to extinguish the conflagration in Crete by imposing a truce on the local belligerents, and endeavouring at the same time to preventtheinsurrection in the island from being made the pretext for more widespreaddisturbance of thepeace of Europe.

This latter danger was becoming every day more serious. Encouraged by their success in Crete, the leaders of theEthnike Hetaireia were preparing for further insurrections in European Turkey in the spring, and hoped to bring the Greek royal army into the field as the nucleus of the revolutionary forces. Macedonia was to rise in insurrection, and the more sanguine spirits anticipated that Bulgaria, Servia, and Montenegro would unite their armies with the Greeks in this new war of liberation. Sixteen years before— in 1881— Thessaly and a portion of Epirus hadbeen wonfor the Greek kingdom by a local insurrection, backed by a military demonstrationby the Greek army. To avoid a conflict which might have involved more than oneof the greatnations of Eastern Europe, tlae Powers had persuaded the Sultan to cede the coveted territories to Greece. It was hoped that the same process would be repeated on a larger scale in the case of Macedonia and that part of Epirus that had been left to Turkey in 1881, and that at the same time the Cretan question would be settled in the sense desired by Greece and her friends throughout Europe.

King Georgeof Greece andhis Government, even if they had desired to act otherwise,had no longer the power to hold aloof from what had nowbecome an enthusiastic national movement against the Turk. Thanks to thepatriotic liberality of wealthyGreeks athome and abroad, the leaders of the Ethnike Hetaireia were in possession ofample funds. They hadpurchased tens of thousands of rifles of the Gras pattern, sold to wholesale dealers in armsby theFrench Governmentwhen it discarded that weapon in order to rearm its infantry with the Lebel repeating rifle. These the Ethnike Hetaireia