The operations of mines and submarines have seriously curtailed the British supply of fish

T

HE first impression made by the great Greek statesman, Eleutherios Venizelos, is that he is not Greek at all. His very name suggests an association with the Venetian aristocrats who ruled his native Crete for four hundred years, while certain authorities trace his ancestry to a Florentine Duke of the fifteenth century. The physical man resembles not the dark and swarthy modern Greek, but the blond and sanguine Northern Italian. Venizelos is tall, slim, blue-eyed; his hair and beard were once brown but are now almost entirely white. His most abiding characteristic is a perpetual and inscrutable smile, which, say certain enthusiasts, recalls that of La Giaconda. In character and mental traits, Venizelos likewise has little in common with the contemporary Greek. While his fellow-countryman is excitable and tempestuous, Venizelos is always cool and deliberate. While the present-day Athenian, like the Athenian of the time of Pericles, is primarily an individualist, Venizelos constantly sinks his own egoism in his disinterested devotion to principle. While modern Greek patriotism consists, in large part, of harangues about Alexander the Great, Demosthenes, and the empire of Byzantium, Venizelos quietly tells his compatriots that "the past belongs to our dead ancestors" and plans the reconstitution of Greece on modern lines. Freeing his fatherland from Turkish massacres and from its own political and social corruptions interests him far more than reconstructing the departed glories of Hellas. To teach the Thessalian peasant how to increase his yearly crops he regards as more important, at present, than the revival of the ancient Attic language. Thus the quality that inspires all his work is sanity-a fact which, in itself, explains the tendency to regard

him as not really a Greek, but a Northern Italian, preferably a Piedmontese.

Yet all this is a misconception. For Venizelos, by ancestry, education, and aspiration, is a pure Hellene. His ancestral home lies at the foot of the Acropolis, in Athens-certainly nothing could be more Greek than that! Here his forefathers were living when the Italian admiral, Morosini, in 1687, bombarded and almost completely destroyed the Parthenon. One of his ancestors, afterward canonized as Saint Philothea Venezela, was beaten to death by the Turks in 1589 and is buried in the Cathedral at Athens. In the last three centuries the family has evidently done much traveling. It had for many years a large estate at Pylos, in the Peloponnesus; thence it moved to Crevata, in Sparta, and thence to the much-suffering island of Crete. The old inhabitants of Mourniès, a beautiful suburb of Canea, tell interesting stories of the birth of the present Venizelos. His mother had already had three children, all of whom had died at birth. Her husband and relatives, on the expectation of another child, called to her assistance all the supernatural powers in the neighborhood. For two days and nights, while the mother was in labor, four priests, two Mohammedans and two Christians, prayed unceasingly in an adjoining room. One of these priests, a Greek who died only four years ago, never wearied of telling this story; the fact that the child lived, and lived to become the maker of modern Greece, he always regarded as due to this special divine interposition. This same priest baptized the boy-the year was 1864-and the name selected, Eleutherios (meaning Deliverer), was happily adapted to the child who, in the next fifty years, was to save several million Greeks from the ravages of the Turk.

If we wish to understand the real