the American constitution. A man of action, not a student, he had probably never read a page of De Tocqueville or of Lord Bryce. But an American known to the writer had informed him that in the United States the President is his own Prime Minister. The numerous differences between America and Greece were ignored, above all the existence of a powerful Senate in the United States which acts as a check upon the President, whereas since 1862 Greece has had no second Chamber, although a Senate formed part of the suspended Constitution of 1925. The word went forth that the amended Greek Constitution (of which 116 out of 117 articles-the original draft had 125-were in abeyance) was to be 'Americanised,' and the public was treated to a series of newspaper articles upon the subject, which revealed astonishing and unexpected familiarity with the intricacies of American constituitional law. But the result was that the election for the Presidency, instead of being held, as the suspended Constitution provided, by the Chamber and Senate, as in the France of to-day, was conducted as in the France of 1848, by a direct appeal to the people, not, as in the United States, by an indirect popular vote.

General Pangalos, who had not yet announced his definite intention to stand, first cleared the ground of awkwardly embarrassing competitors. He prohibited the candidature of any member of the Royal family and of Mr Venizelos, on the very plausible ground that such a candidature would revive that spirit of civic strife, which it had been his consistent policy to stifle, and which has happily diminished since the death of one protagonist and the patriotic exile and self-effacement of the other. His next step was to limit the choice to men between the ages of 45 and 65-Mr Venizelos is 62 and so required a special decree of disability. The object of this age limit was to eliminate the candidature of the man who, if he had consented to stand, would have been elected by the free vote of nearly all the Greek people-Mr Alexander Zaïmes. Mr Zaïmes is the utility man of Greek politics, to whom in various awkward situations the people have turned, and not in vain. A member of a distinguished family of the War of Independence, the son of an eminent Prime Minister,

five times Prime Minister himself, a former High Commissioner of Crete, an ex-Governor of the National Bank, and a man of moderate opinions, moderately but rarely expressed, he would have been the ideal President of a Conservative Republic. But he is 70, and so, at the outset, he was excluded from the contest. Thus General Pangalos, who, being 48, was not disqualified by age, had carefully laid down the rules for the competition in which he intended to be a competitor.

But, just as in 1886, when Lord Randolph Churchill, resigning the Chancellorship of the Exchequer in order to improve his position, 'forgot Goschen,' so General Pangalos, in fixing the age limits, had forgotten Mr Constantine Demertzês, aged 49, upon whom all parties, Republican and Royalist, with rare unanimity cast their lot. Mr Demertzês was in many respects an excellent candidate. He was a moderate Royalist, who had been twice Minister of Marine; he was well-off, a lawyer in good practice, and the husband of a lady of social gifts, who belonged to the very ancient Athenian family of the Chalkokondylai, the subject of a recent monograph by Mr Kampouroglous and famous as having produced the last medieval history of Athens. This unexpected choice seemed for the moment to have placed General Pangalos in a noose from which there was no escape, but the Dictator, who has Albanian blood in his veins, is a man of resource. He at once offered to repeal the 65 years' limit, so as to permit the candidature of Mr Zaïmes, which would have split the vote for Mr Demertzês. But Mr Zaïmes, as was expected by all who knew him, categorically refused to accept the Presidency even if elected, and showed that he meant what he said by taking a ticket immediately for abroad. General Pangalos thereupon sent two emissaries, the ex-Premier and former Prince-maker of Samos, Mr Sophoules, and the ex-Minister, Mr Tsirimokos, both politicians who had disapproved of the choice of the coalition, to Hydra to induce Admiral Coundouriotes to withdraw his resignation. This the retiring President was willing to do, on condition that a general election was held in two or three months at the latest. But almost before his answer had reached Athens, General Pangalos had decided to stand himself-which had doubtless been his

real intention all along. The coalition chiefs cheerfully accepted the challenge, but naturally they demanded certain guarantees for the freedom of the election, more especially that it should be held—as is usual in Greeceon the same day throughout the whole country, and that their representatives should be present, together with the Government officials, not only at the counting of the votes, but throughout the polling. These demands were refused, and, following the precedent set for the last time by the autocratic Premier, Boulgares, in 1874, General Pangalos decreed that voting should be held in 12 out of 35 Greek provinces on April 4, and in the remaining 23 a week later. Meanwhile, the results of the first carefully selected 12 would influence the mentality of the remaining 23, just as happened in ancient Rome and in modern England within our memory. The excuse was that in the deferred constituencies the necessary preparations could not be made in time, owing to the difficulties of communication. Thereupon, the Opposition proclaimed its abstention from the unequal contest, in which the dice were loaded against it, and Mr Demertzês withdrew his candidature.

General Pangalos accordingly went to the polls on April 4 as the sole candidate, and his election was a foregone conclusion, but in the morning the voting in Athens was so slack, that the moderate section of the officers favourable to General Pangalos advised him to come to terms with the coalition leaders. Accordingly, one of them was surprised by a telephone message from General Spyridonos, Minister of the Interior, offering to place his portfolio at their disposition till after the following polling-day a week later, so that they might satisfy themselves of the fairness of the results. This offer they declined, and meanwhile General Pangalos, influenced, it was said, by the intransigent officers of the garrison, had stiffened his back, and the negotiations broke down. The polling resulted in his election by an overwhelming majority of the votes recordedrather more than 40 per cent. of the total number of registered electors-for, in spite of Mr Demertzês' withdrawal, a few votes were still given to him. It is beyond doubt that in some constituencies, in Macedonia, Spetsai, Levkas, and Corfù, for example, many of the

poorer electors voted eagerly and spontaneously for General Pangalos. As a person peculiarly well informed about Macedonia told me, the peasants there considered him as the friend of the poor and the enemy of the rich and the officials, and the hanging of two officials-found guilty of malversation, by a decree which made capital punishment retrospective-gained him numerous suffrages among the masses. So Robin Hood would have been a popular candidate for the Sherwood Forest division. The result proved General Pangalos to have a shrewd knowledge of the psychology of the crowd; the only miscalculation which he made was that he underrated his own popularity. The facts showed that he could have afforded to run the risk of an election less 'cabined and confined' by his own regulations. But his tenure of power rests not upon the number of votes recorded for him by 'the people,' whom he had addressed in the second person singular and in the 'vulgar' idiom, but upon the will of the majority of the army officers. For since the march from Goudi upon Athens in 1909, the army, to adapt a phrase of Tacitus, has learned the fatal secret that Governments are made, and unmade, in the barracks. The Dictator cannot be surprised, if some other general should imitate the example which he himself set in 1925. He has put a price of 500,000 drachmai upon the head of his dangerous, and disinterested, rival, General Plastiras, the leader of the 'Revolutionary' Government which deposed King Constantine in 1922, and the Chief of the State, who, refusing all honours and renouncing all ambitions, retired into private life on the return of Mr Venizelos in January 1924. Imperium asseruit, non sibi, sed patriæ.

General Pangalos is undoubtedly a man of ability; but those who have transacted business with him notice his changeable policy, due to the fact that he is apt to be influenced by the last person who has been with him. He is a good speaker for a soldier; his oratorical style consists of short, sharp sentences, delivered rather after the fashion of minute-guns; and he can write, like most Greek public men, a readable article in 'purist' Greek, as well as in the language of his electoral manifesto. But he has little experience of foreign affairs, of which, with the collaboration of his amiable minister, Mr

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Kanakares Rouphos, an agreeable gentleman of an old Patras family, he is the supreme director, as of all other departments. So far the foreign policy of the Dictator has been chiefly remarkable for its rapprochement with Italy. The relations between Greece and her Western neighbour somewhat resemble those between Italy and Austria before the war. The Italians did not love Austria, but Italian statesmen felt that Italy must be her ally, if she did not want to be her enemy. Similarly, the Greeks, mindful of the Italian occupation, and retention of the Dodekanese (in spite of the VenizelosTittoni agreement of July 29, 1919, and the treaty signed by Mr Venizelos and Count Bonin Longare at Sèvres on Aug. 10, 1920), and of the bombardment of Corfù with its tale of human lives, cannot be expected to regard Italy with the same affection which they undoubtedly feel for Great Britain. But official Greece realises that Italy can make herself disagreeable to her, while Great Britain of recent years unfortunately has shown little interest in Greek affairs. Moreover, the Italians never lose an opportunity of putting themselves in evidence, while the older Mediterranean Power hides her light. Thus, while the long official mourning for the late Queen Alexandra effaced us from the official life of Greece, the Italian Legation, despite the more recent mourning for the late Queen Margherita, obtained special leave from Rome to be present at the official party at Government House. Thus, again, whilst the Italian military and naval attachés were both present at the centenary of the Sortie from Mesolonghi-a town more than any other in Greece connected with Great Britain through the memory of Byron-and deposited wreaths from the Italian army and navy-non-existent in 1826-on the tomb of the fallen in the Herôon, no official representative of the British Government was there, although the memorial pillar on the site of Byron's house was surrounded by a waving mass of British flags and Greeks and Americans laid wreaths upon it! Meanwhile, the Italians work hard against their inactive rivals. Many Greeks believe that the curt dismissal of Admiral Townsend's Naval Mission, ostensibly due to motives of economy (which did not prevent the retention of the whole French Military Mission, after a protest by the French Minister),