After a long debate on Eastern affairs and on the questions raised by M. Millerand’s communications, the Commission for Foreign Affairs, seeing things were taking a bad turn, and the situation of France in Syria, Cilicia, and Constantinople was getting alarming, decided on June 15 to send a delegation to the East to make an inquiry on the spot. At the first sitting of the French Chamber on June 25, 1920, M. Briand, who three months before had made a speech in favour of the 1916 agreements which were being threatened by English ambition, though he considered the Turkish bands “went too far,” and our policy “played too much into their hands,” felt it incumbent on him to say: “When we leave a nation like Turkey, after a long war, for over a year, under what might be called a Scotch douche, telling her now ‘Thou shalt live,’ now ‘Thou shalt not live,’ we strain its nerves to the extreme, we create within it a patriotic excitement, a patriotic exasperation, which now becomes manifest in the shape of armed bands. We call them bands of robbers; in our own country we should call them ‘bands of patriots.’” In the course of the general discussion of the Budget, during a debate which took place on July 28 in the Senate, an amendment was brought in by M. Victor Bérard and some of his colleagues calling for a reduction of 30 million francs on the sums asked for by the Government, which already amounted, as a beginning, to 185 million francs. M. d’Estournelles de Constant then expressed his fear that this Eastern expedition might cause France to make sacrifices out of proportion to her resources in men and money, and asked how the Government expected to recuperate the expenditure incurred in Syria. M. Victor Bérard, in his turn, sharply criticised our Eastern policy. M. Bompard, too, expressed his fears concerning our Syrian policy, and M. Doumergue asked the Government to consent to a reduction of the credits “to show it intended to act cautiously in Syria.” But after M. Millerand’s energetic answer, and after M. Doumer, chairman of the Commission, had called upon the Senate to accept the figures proposed by the Government and the Commission, these figures were adopted by 205 votes against 84. M. Romanos, interviewed by the _Matin_,[31] and soon after M. Venizelos, at the Lympne Conference, maintained that the treaty could be fully carried out, and the Greeks felt quite able to enforce it themselves. As the Allied troops were not sufficient to take decisive action, and as a large part of the Ottoman Empire had been assigned to Greece, England herself soon asked why the latter should not be called upon to pay for the operation if she insisted upon carrying it out. About June 20 the situation of the British troops became rather serious, as General Milne did not seem to have foreseen the events and was certainly unable to control them.