Nine decades ago the Duc de Broglie clearly explained that the aim of France in assisting to liberate Greece from the Turkish yoke was to have in the Eastern Mediterranean an instrument of her own ambition: "a State disposed to turn her eyes constantly towards that Power who has made her free--to watch for us over the ports of the Levant, to guard with us the mouth of the Black Sea and the keys of the Bosphorus [Transcriber's note: Bosporus?]";--it followed that the greater the client, the better for the patron's purpose. After undergoing many fluctuations and modifications, this idea was revived at the time of the Balkan wars, when France, together with Germany, supported the Greek claim to Cavalla, and it was fostered to an unhealthy growth during the European War. Hence the identification of France with M. Venizelos, who stood for a policy of expansion at all hazards, and her hostility to King Constantine who, preferring safety to hazardous ventures, stood for Greece's right to shape her course without dictation from Paris any more than from Berlin. {231} By the methods which she employed, France succeeded in gaining Greece and losing the Greeks. Nothing else could have been expected: friends are sometimes to be won by good offices; sometimes by the promise of good offices; and sometimes by good words. They are seldom won by injuries, and by insults never. It is curious that so elementary a lesson in human nature should have been unknown to the able men who guided the policy and diplomacy of France during the War, who raised her military prestige and re-established her position in the first rank of the European Powers. Yet it is a fact--a fact which can be easily verified by a reference to their utterances: they are upon record. Brute force, and brute force, and again brute force: such is the burden that runs through them all; and it embodies a doctrine: the Greeks are Orientals and must be wooed with terror: on the notion, enunciated by an English humorist as a paradox, and adopted by French statesmen as an axiom, that terror sown in the Oriental heart will yield a harvest of esteem--even of affection. With this mad dogma nailed to her mast, France set out upon her voyage for the conquest of the Hellenic heart. It was the first of her mistakes--and it was accompanied by another.