was in no position to offer any resistance. The mass of the people, although less enthusiastic about Constantine than the higher classes, was hostile to Venizelos because he represented war, and they had no wish to fight. But there was also an ardently Venizelist minority, comprising some of the best elements of the country, who saw beyond mean party struggles and immediate material interests. It was this group which, with support of the Allies, ended by triumphing. Thus the National Defence Government came to an end, and Greece was once more united. In Italy, the Greek situation was never fully understood, nor the inner meaning of these events. For some time before the great war Italo-Greek relations had been unfriendly on account of the Dodecannese question and our interests in Albania. Italian public opinion had defended Albanian independence, whereas Greece aspired to annex the southern part of the country, including Argyrocastro and Koritza which Greeks described as “Northern Epirus.” During the Balkan War the Greeks had occupied Epirus and South Albania, but later they had had to evacuate the latter territory; on the outbreak of the Great War they invaded it again and devastated it. The feelings of Greece towards the Entente were uncertain; our intervention rendered her somewhat hostile because she did not, for the above-mentioned reasons, wish to find herself in alliance with Italy.[30] The insolent and petulant attitude of the Greek press intensified anti-Greek feeling in Italy. Greece’s failure to meet her engagements arising from the Serbo-Greek Alliance, and later her whole attitude towards the Allies in Macedonia, culminating in the surrender of Rupel and the IV Army Corps, convinced Italian public opinion that the great majority of the Greek people were pro-German. On the other hand we were suspicious of Venizelos because he represented the Imperialist spirit of unlimited Greek expansion, and Italians did not believe that Greek Imperialism had a sound basis, because they considered that the Greeks lacked the qualities required in a race destined to rule. But in Italy it was not perhaps understood that Venizelos himself was a much bigger man than the _milieu_ in which his activity was displayed, and that he was in reality rendering services to the Entente and therefore to us. In Britain and France, on the other hand, public opinion wrongly believed that he had his people absolutely behind him and that that people was, as a whole, up to his standard.