While frustrating his country's efforts to find a way out of the pass into which he had intrigued it, the Cretan and his partisans did not neglect other forms of activity. We have seen that rebellion had already broken out at Salonica. In Athens itself the walls were pasted with Venizelist newspapers in the form of placards displaying headlines such as these: "A LAST APPEAL TO THE KING!" "DRAW THE SWORD, O KING, OR ABDICATE!" It was no secret that arms and ammunition were stored in private houses, that the French Intelligence Service had a depot of explosives in a ship moored at the Piraeus, and a magazine of rifles and grenades in its headquarters at the French School of Athens.[9] The Royalist journals threatened the Venizelists with condign punishment for their treasonable designs. The Venizelist journals, far from denying the charge, replied that they would be fully justified in arming themselves against the hostile Reservist Leagues. In short, the capital swarmed with conspirators, but the guardians of public order were powerless, owing to the proximity of the Allied naval guns, ready to enforce respect for the Allied flags under whose protection the conspiracy was carried on. By this time the French and British detectives had usurped the powers and inverted the functions of the police organs;[10] and the French and {128} British agents, after fomenting those fatal differences which divide and degrade a people, had developed into directors of plots and organizers of sedition. But, in spite of such encouragement, the capital--or, indeed, any part of Old Greece--had never appealed to M. Venizelos as a starting-point of sedition. He knew that only in the recently acquired and as yet imperfectly assimilated regions--regions under the direct influence of the Allies--he could hope to rebel with safety. His plan embraced, besides Salonica, the islands conquered in 1912, particularly his native Crete. In that home of immemorial turbulence his friends, seconded by British Secret Service and Naval officers, had found many retired bandits eager to resume work. Even there, it is true, public opinion was not strikingly favourable to disloyalty; but the presence of the British Fleet in Suda Bay had much of persuasion in it.[11]