The real agitation began when the Assembly finally adjourned to Boutzounaria, a tiny village at the edge of the plain of CanÉa. Three thousand men were assembled on a little plateau overlooking the plain, and about three miles from the city. Here gushes out of the living rock the stream which supplies the city with water, by an aqueduct which dates from the Hellenic times. Metellus cut it when he laid siege to Cydonia, and the Cretans in the war of Greek independence repeated the offence, and though, in the latter case, the siege was raised by a fleet and army coming to the assistance of the Turks, the sufferings produced by cutting off the water were very great.

From here the people had a safe retreat into their fastnesses above, and had nothing to fear from the Turkish forces. They came unarmed, but kept patrols at night on all the roads leading from the city to guard against surprise. By day they could observe the whole plain from Suda to Platania; and here, looking down on the orange groves of Murnies and Perivoglia, the wide expanse of olive orchards, and the fields where thousands of sheep, the property of Mussulmans mainly, feed while the herbage is green with the spring rains, they passed the time much after the old Greek fashion, games of agility and strength occupying the time of the young, while the old discussed the affairs of state; but no disorder occurred during the session of the Assembly proper. Sheep were roasted whole, the messengers came and went, deputations from the further districts came in slowly, others whose affairs demanded their presence at home went away, there being none of those professed politicians who live by attending conventions, and making the public harm their good, so that there could be no vicarious expression of opinion.

Finally, all was done, the ne plus ultra of democracy had said its say, and signed its name for the indignant regards of the most despotic of sovereigns. A solemn deputation of gray-headed captains of villages, the executive committee, brought to each of the consuls a copy of the petition, and consigned the original to the Governor for transmission to Constantinople. This functionary had been growing uneasy about the apparent unanimity and deliberateness of the Assembly, and, having cast his lead occasionally and found the water deeper than he thought, began to be anxious to see the Assembly dispersed. The moral force of the recognition by the consular corps of the peaceful and legal character of the meeting had dissuaded him from interrupting its labors; but, the petition once delivered, he peremptorily ordered the Cretans to go home and wait the answer, intending to repeat the trick he had so successfully tried before, namely, arresting the chiefs and calling a counter-assembly; and, further ordering the committee to disperse, it refused.

This was the position into which the Pasha had desired to draw the Cretans. Their Assembly was perfectly legal, they having a firman which permitted them to meet unarmed, the Porte having long before seen the impolicy of depriving them of a custom which was of so great antiquity and reverence; but the Pasha hoped to give an illegal color to their refusal to obey his order, and, according to his habit of making his will the supreme law, determined to make use of their persistence in their rights to precipitate the collision which he knew they were unprepared for; and, having once excited armed resistance, even against an illegal use of authority, he confidently counted on the support not only of his own government, but of the consuls. To this end, he called a conference of the consular corps, at which, having stated the measures he had taken, he declared his intention to use the military force at his disposal to disperse the Assembly. In this conference, a division was shown as to the advisability of using force. The French consul (a Levantine[C] of the lowest order, a bastard of one of the De Lesseps family by a Jewish adventuress, and an intense hater of the Greeks ever since the society of Syra, where he was once Chancelier de Consulat, refused to recognize his mistress, a retired saltimbanque from a cafÉ chantant of the Champs ElysÉes) supported the Pasha in everything, and even urged him to greater arbitrariness. The English consul, Mr. Dickson, a man of the most humane character and entire honesty, had an unfortunate weakness before constituted authorities, and the greatest possible respect for the Turks, coupled with an Englishman's innate dislike for a Greek. He had his orders, moreover, to co-operate with his French colleague, and, with his good faith and unsuspecting nature, he was no match for his intriguing and mendacious yoke-fellow, who led him wherever he wished. It was like coupling a faithful mastiff to a dirty bazaar dog. These two supported the Pasha from very different motives, but with the same result. All the others opposed any violence as inexpedient and unjustifiable, being entirely assured of the peaceful intentions of the committee. Ismael opened the discussion by rehearsing his labors with the Assembly to induce them to submit and disperse, and declared that, having exhausted persuasion, he should employ force if the committee did not at once dissolve. Mr. Dickson said that his Excellency deserved great credit for his moderation, and hoped that he would continue to show the same quality, adding that thus far the Assembly had behaved in a strictly legal manner, being convoked in accordance with their privileges, but admitted that, if they refused to disperse on order, they rendered themselves amenable to force. M. DerchÉ, the French consul, urged their immediate violent dispersal, but the others all declared their opinion that, the Assembly having met for a legal purpose, and having so far comported themselves in an entirely unoffensive manner and showed no intention of going beyond the object for which they had met, the Pasha had no pretext for the employment of force. Mr. Colucci, the Italian consul, then stated that he had received information that the committee had expressed their willingness to disperse on receiving the assurance that the signers of the petition should not be persecuted by the Pasha, and that he considered that the Governor owed this assurance, since he and all others admitted that the Assembly and committee had so far committed no illegal act. His Excellency dodged the suggestion, and, rising, was about to dismiss the conference, when, seeing that all was on the point of being won to the arbitrary course of the Pasha, I begged to offer my protest against any implied endorsement on my part of the proposed violence, as, until the assurance of immunity had been given the Cretans, the peaceful expedients for assuring tranquillity had not been exhausted, or need for employment of force arisen. The Italian, Russian, and other consuls followed me in protest. The Pasha, disconcerted, sat down again, and the discussion was renewed. His Excellency hesitated, but DerchÉ came to his relief with reasons for his not according the immunity asked, saying that the Pasha had no right to compromise the intentions of his government. I replied that there was no question of Constantinople in the matter. The Cretans had confidence in the good-will of the Sultan, but not in his Excellency. Mr. Dickson was of opinion that the assurance was already implied in the Pasha's promise to support the petition with the Porte, and that, as the Assembly had committed no act to deserve persecution, it could not be supposed that they would be subjected to it. He therefore regarded the assurance as uncalled for. Six consuls were against the Pasha, and two with him, but he took M. DerchÉ's clue, and stood firm on the ground which that led him to, and so the conference ended.

The Pasha had, however, failed in getting the moral support of the consular corps to the blow which he had intended to strike, and dared not send the troops out. He made a great blunder in calling the conference, as the consuls had no right of intervention in the affair, but, like all over-cunning people, he caught himself in the trap he set for us. Having invited us not really to get our opinion, though he asked it, but to get our endorsement to his policy, he not only failed in this, but got a rebuff which made the experiment more hazardous than if he had said nothing. It had another bad effect for him in making public the difference between his Excellency and the consular corps, and, as the latter is believed in Turkish countries to be omnipotent, the popular feeling was immensely strengthened.[D] The irritation of the Pasha against the consular corps was unbounded, especially against Colucci and myself; indeed, I may say, peculiarly against myself as an old enemy and the spokesman of the opposition.

Popular rumor magnified the difference, and myths as wild as those of the day of Minos made the tour of the island; one which I saw in a Greek newspaper represented me as rising in the conference and declaring that, if the Pasha sent troops against the committee, I would go and put myself in front of them, and then we should see if the troops dared fire!

Meanwhile, all the friendly consuls united in urging the dissolution of the committee, and leaving the protection of individuals to the governments of the protecting powers, as the only means of averting what was seen to be a disastrous affair for the Cretans. That this was the true policy events have shown. The Cretans were not prepared to fight at that time, their friends on the Continent were no more prepared to assist them, and there was no supply of powder or arms in the island, nothing but old tufeks, trophies of the war of 1821-30; the whole Turkish empire was at peace, and its available force ready to be poured on the island. The committee wavered and half-decided to disperse, they offered to put themselves as a committee into the hands of the Pasha, and await in his palace, or other quarters assigned them, the reply to the petition. This was refused, and the critical question hung by a hair. The influence of two persons prevailed over the committee against that of the consuls—one a priest called Parthenius KelaÏdes, there being two Parthenii in the committee; the other a Greek physician, temporarily in the island, known by the two names of Joannides and Pappadakis, long resident in England, an ultra-radical, and one of those who, ultra-demagogical in all their tendencies, are really honest in their intentions, and, wishing to do good, only succeed in doing the greater evil. In Crete, Dr. Joannides is generally considered as the immediate cause of the disastrous turn events took, and, as soon as the insurrection took active form, he abandoned it to its manifest destiny, and has never been heard of since in the island. It has always been a question if the Russian consul was sincere in his union with his colleagues of the majority, it being thought by some that in his hostility, mainly personal, to the French consul, he secretly took ground against the unconditional submission, that the Pasha and M. DerchÉ might not carry the day. Be this as it may, I am confident that with regard to fighting he was in accord with his colleagues, and considered that actual insurrection should be avoided, and that the instructions of the government were to this effect. But he was a man of very unsound judgment, and so passionate and personal in his way of seeing men and matters that I have always been of the opinion that, from mere personal feeling against DerchÉ, he secretly strengthened Parthenius, over whom his influence was supreme, in his obstinacy, and so prevented the dispersal of the committee, which finally withdrew to the mountains to be secure from a coup de main. Before doing so, however, they offered to allow two or more battalions of troops to guard them at Boutzounaria, a proposition which the Pasha refused peremptorily, knowing that, so long as the committee remained a constituted body, the Cretans would respect its authority, but that, if they dissolved and dispersed, they would lose all right to act, or control over the people. So ingrained is the Cretan's regard for the law of his ancient tradition that, while the whole population would have risen at once at the call of the committee as long as it was constituted, not one of the districts would have regarded an appeal made by the individual members when they had ceased to represent in due form the original Assembly. The question at issue was not, then, a trivial one, and in the reply to it lay the decision of peace or war.