None can understand the tragedy that was enacted in Asia Minor in 1922, none is fitted to pass judgment upon it, none has the right to venture an opinion on the rôle the Greeks will still play in the settlement of the Near Eastern question, without having made a serious and sympathetic attempt to follow the Hellenic national movement through the century of struggle that culminated in the collapse of the Greek armies in Asia Minor and the burning of Smyrna in September, 1922. The legend has grown that Greece is the victim of the imperialistic folly of her greatest statesman, who involved his people in ambitious dreams of conquest that were impossible of fulfilment. Admirers of Venizelos, to refute this legend, have launched another legend. They have tried to make the world believe that Greece’s disasters and humiliation are due to a pro-German king, supported by an unscrupulous group of politicians, who almost ruined his country during the World War through intrigues with Germany, and whose dramatic return to the throne in 1920 robbed Greece of the advantages Venizelos had secured for her in the Treaty of Sèvres. The rival legends are based upon a threefold misapprehension of the connection between the Greek people and the little Kingdom of Greece, of the relations of the great powers with the Kingdom of Greece and the Greek people, and of the significance, internally and internationally, of the Venizelist movement since 1910. It has been assumed by most writers that the Kingdom of Greece, as constituted after the War of Independence, marked the resurrection of the nation, and was the natural and logical outcome of a struggle for emancipation. This error came from a confusion of classical Greece with historic Greece. Up to this day it has not been realized in Occidental Europe and America that the Greek national movement does not have its inspiration in the ancient glory of Athens and Sparta, of Corinth and Thebes. The Peloponnesus and Attica and the coast-lands of the Gulf of Corinth never formed a united country, inhabited by a people enjoying a common nationhood.