By this time, the Powers had learned how utterly mendacious all the Turkish official reports were, and that the insurrection was further than ever from being suppressed; and the Porte, dreading the effect of the knowledge of the utter failure of the Imperial Commission from which it had promised itself such immense results, developed a new plan, in which the douceurs of a plÉbiscite were to be administered by its armies, and a new assembly constituted, who were to sit at Constantinople, and represent both the Mussulman and Christian populations as an advisory council on the new measures of reform which were to pacify the conquered islanders. The most curious of all the strange characteristics of this affair were the persistence of the Turkish Government in misinforming Europe of the position of the struggle, and the willingness of official Europe to be misinformed. Now, at a moment when every corps of the Turkish army had been defeated, the Porte, with a ludicrous gravity which would have been comical in the extreme if one could have forgotten the misery of starvation, of barbarism, death by cold and fire and sword, with atrocities without name which were momentarily being perpetrated by its authority on the helpless victims of its paternal tenderness, sent to Crete its ablest diplomatic agent, Server Effendi, with the following proclamation, nominally addressed to the Commissioner, but really to the Powers, Server Effendi being actually the plenipotentiary, Mustapha being in disgrace, but openly honored by an honor as delusive as the victories by which he had secured it:

"It is needless to tell thee that we are deeply grieved at the insurrection which has been fomented in Crete by ill-intentioned people, at the evils which have resulted from it to the inhabitants, and at the blood which a cruel necessity has forced to flow. If, notwithstanding all their efforts, our Government have not been able to prevent these misfortunes, if the paternal advice which they gave to the misguided inhabitants, in order to bring them back to the line of duty, have remained fruitless, the responsibility must wholly fall, before God and the tribunal of public opinion, upon the instigators of these calamities.

"The wise behavior, however, of the islanders who, understanding the real state of things, remained faithful to us, and, on the other hand, the bravery of which our Imperial army has given most signal proofs in fighting against the insurgents, as well as the wise measures which thou hastenedest to take, have powerfully contributed to restore peace and security in all parts of the island, with the exception of such as are infested by the presence of foreign brigands. Those islanders who, giving way to culpable insinuations and deluded by false promises, have some time followed these seditious agents, have hastened to profit by the general amnesty granted beforehand, and have returned to their duties. A committee has therefore been formed in our capital for the purpose of examining and framing a future mode of administration of the island for the new Governor, who is to be sent there as soon as matters shall have reassumed their normal condition. Thus the committee will have to look to the best means of repairing the ills sustained by the country, to perfect the administration in conformity with the legitimate and indispensable wants of the people, and to effect thus that prosperity which results from the development of agriculture and commerce; in a word, they will have to procure a general bettering of the condition of the country. But for these measures relating to the government of the island to succeed, and for the welfare and prosperity to be realized, it has been deemed necessary to consult likewise some of the principal people of the island, who enjoy the confidence of the inhabitants. On the suggestion, therefore, of our Government, we have approved of and instruct thee to proceed to the election, by the inhabitants, of one or two notables, Mohammedans or not, taken in each district, and to send here as soon as possible those who may have been selected. Be careful to bring to the knowledge of the public the present Imperial firman, and to be at the same time with the inhabitants of the island the interpreter of the good intentions with which we are animated towards them."

Server Effendi was really a most intelligent and (for a Turk) humane administrator, and, had he not been crippled by the necessity of keeping up the absurd pretence of an actual conquest achieved, might have found some sortie from the difficulty, which would have arrested the train of disasters which afterwards brought the Porte so near to its final quietus. He made himself no delusions, and, I believe, propagated none at Constantinople. In point of fact, no one of the responsible governments there was now deceived; but the Sultan had passed into a monomaniacal condition of fury on the subject of the conquest of Crete, and no Grand Vizier could have remained in office who proposed an abandonment of the war without conquest. The powers, except England, counselled the Porte to yield a principality, and it is probable that, if England had acceded, the Cretans would, at that time, have accepted this solution of the question in spite of the Hellenic influence. The policy of England has always seemed to me mistaken to Turkey and faithless to the Cretans, for, in effect, all the powers signatory of the protocol of February 20, 1830, were morally bound to secure to the Cretans a similar condition to that of Samos. But it must at the same time, be admitted that this policy was open, consistent, and, so far as Turkey was concerned, loyal, while that of France was double, disloyal to all her allies, wavering, and entirely egotistic; and that of Russia was consistent only in its unfaltering hostility to Turkey, and its willingness to favor any affair that promised to weaken her empire. The tactics of Greece were of a nature to make the chances of Crete more precarious than they need have been. The policy of Crete for Greece, rather than Crete for her own good, made confusion and jealousy in the conduct of the war much greater than they need have been. What the Cretans wanted was a good leader, arms, and bread. Greece sent them rival chiefs without subordination, a rabble of volunteers, who quarrelled with the islanders, and weakened the cause by deserting it as soon as they felt the strain of danger and hardship; and if, after the first campaign, they were more wise in enrolling men to go to Crete, they still allowed the jealousies and hostilities of the leaders to go unchecked by any of those measures which were in their power. But the radical fault of the Hellenes was that they compromised the question by the introduction of the question of annexation, and forced it into the field of international interests, disguising the real causes and justification of the movement, and making it impossible for England consistently with her declared policy to entertain the complaints of the Cretans without also admitting to consideration the pretensions of the Hellenes. If the latter had not intruded their views on the tapis, the former might have been heard; but, from the moment in which annexation to Greece became the alternative of the reconquest of Crete, the English Government could clearly not interfere against the Porte without upsetting its own work, and if, in some minor respects, especially the question of the principality, she had been more kind to Crete, no one could have found fault with a policy which was, in its general tendency, obligatory on her. Her great mistake was in not recognizing more clearly the utterly irresponsible nature of the Turkish administration, and compelling the Porte to redress the wrongs which even Dickson, philottoman as he was to the last degree, could not ignore the reality of, before they had passed into the arbitration of arms. I believe that, if Lord Lyons had had the direction of affairs from the beginning, he would have composed the difficulty without bloodshed, for he saw clearly and understood the real merits of the question.

Server Effendi succeeded in naming deputies from nearly all the districts of the island, and in compelling most of them to go to Constantinople. One escaped, and came to my house to ask asylum. Of course I was compelled to give it, and he remained for six weeks my guest, when he escaped, disguised as a Russian sailor, on board a Russian corvette, and went to Greece. The others were sent under guard to the capital, where they also demanded protection from the Russian Legation, declaring that they came against their own will, and that of the Cretan people; and so in effect ended a farce, put on the stage with all the appliances of the Turkish Government, and played with their best actors.

The arrival of a new swift steamer from England, for the purpose of running the blockade, gave a new Élan to the insurrection, and the Arkadi (formerly the Dream of American blockade celebrity), was from this time until her destruction in August of 1867 an element of the first importance in the war. The former blockade-runner, the Panhellenion, was a slow steamer, never making above nine miles per hour, and her success in provisioning without a mishap the insurrection for nearly a year, with a squadron of thirty ships to watch her, is one of the most surprising instances of capacity on one side, or incapacity on the other, in the history of marine warfare. The Arkadi not only brought arms and supplies, but she carried away at almost every trip numbers of non-combatants, and formed a safe and reliable means of communication between Greece and Crete, by which messengers, supplies of all kinds, and every requisite for the war were transported with tolerable certainty. The warm weather enabled the insurgents to re-enter the field in greater numbers, and it finally became evident that the war was to be one which would only be finished by the exhaustion of the resources either of Greece or Turkey.

A change in administration at Athens had brought a more capable and thoroughly national council into power, under the presidency of Mr. Comoundouros, the ablest and clearest-headed statesman of the Hellenic kingdom, who had discouraged an appeal to arms until the war became a fait accompli, when he advocated a policy of aid to Crete coÛte qu'il coÛte, and, on assuming power, made the insurrection his chief care. The whole resources of Greece were devoted to it, and the funds of the insurgent committee at Athens were fed directly from the national treasury. There was, no doubt, scarcely any disguise about the complicity; but public feeling in Greece was so thoroughly enlisted that no government could have existed which did not unmistakably favor the insurrection. Unfortunately for the success of the Greek plans, the government did not impose on the Cretans an effective organization and a supreme commander. It still based its chief hope on European intervention, and counted on a limitation of the struggle by their influence, instead of preparing to act in the most complete independence. There was some excuse for this in a statesman-for-the-moment, in the fact that intervention had already begun by the overtures of Russia, acceded to at this date by France, whose Emperor was at the juncture ready to come to an understanding with the Czar on the basis of mutual concession; but Comoundouros should have seen that the readiness of Greece to endure and prolong a war with Turkey would be the best argument for the intervention the former desired. Greek politics have always had the fault of being based on sentimentality, and calculating too much on the sympathy of Christendom and classical scholars, neither of which has ever played a noteworthy part in modern Hellenic history, for even the genuine philhellenism of 1821 would have accomplished nothing had it not been that Turkey stood in the way of Russian combinations. The Greeks seem never to comprehend that governments are purely political, and never influenced by sentiment or religious affinities. They count that Hellenism and Christianity must always be weighed in the Eastern question, and in this case calculated on forcing the hand of the Christian powers by these appliances; while if they had proved that they were capable of conducting the war with energy and good system, preparing themselves meanwhile for a war with Turkey, Europe must have interfered, as a war between Greece and Turkey involved too momentous questions to be risked for so small an affair as Crete, and Christianity might have got the casting vote in deciding which side interference should favor. If Russia had been sincere in her friendship for Greece, she might have helped the question to a speedy ending by giving the word to the Danubian provinces to rise; but she has never desired a strong Hellenic kingdom, and this Comoundouros understood clearly, and that any intervention voluntarily made by Russia would be for her own interest purely, and that, holding as he did the initiative in a movement of all the Christian races, he could, by the employment of it, compel Russia to favor his plans or lose her prestige with them, and to a great extent her moral influence. It was with this view that he prepared movements in Epirus and Thessaly, while Montenegro became agitated, and the seeds of the Cretan trouble seemed wafted over the whole Turkish Empire.

Pending the question of intervention, the transport of families waited the arrival of the American ship, of which no advices came. I telegraphed to Admiral Goldsborough for news of her, and received reply that he knew nothing of any orders for Crete. Subsequent information showed that our Secretary of Legation at Constantinople, a Levantine, and, like his class in general, devoted to the Turkish Government, and a most rancorous and persistent assailant of both Mr. Morris and myself in the journals of Europe and America (and whom the disgraceful condition of our diplomatic service permitted to assail the acts of his superior and the declared policy of his own government), acting in the interests of the Turkish Government, had put himself in communication with the naval authorities by the intermediation of officers attached to the squadron in European waters, and instigated the revocation of the decision of the Government, and, when finally the Canandaigua arrived in the middle of March, she had orders to do nothing in any way disagreeable to the Turkish authorities; and I soon found that the state of feeling in the navy was anything but favorable to the employment of our ships for humane purposes, I myself, as instigator of their discomfort, being treated by the officers with a degree of incivility which showed as little good-breeding as esprit de patrie, and was manifested so openly as to encourage the local authorities in their systematic persecution of me. With the exception of two or three of the younger officers, the whole wardroom broadly expressed their sympathies with the Turkish Government, so that, after having persuaded Captain Strong, who sympathized somewhat with the awkwardness of my position, to run down to Retimo with me to look into the condition of the Christian families shut up in that town, I saw the Canandaigua sail, with a heartfelt desire not to see one of my country's men-of-war again while I was on the station. The Commissioner showed his appreciation of our official servility by ostentatiously ignoring the visit of Captain Strong, passing the Canandaigua by without notice, while he visited all the other foreign men-of-war in the harbor.