With the removal of Trikoupis from the helm, Greece ran straight upon the rocks.  A disastrous war with Turkey was precipitated in 1897 by events in Krete.  It brought the immediate debacle of the army and the reoccupation of Thessaly for a year by Turkish troops, while its final penalties were the cession of the chief strategical positions along the northern frontier and the imposition of an international commission of control over the Greek finances, in view of the complete national bankruptcy entailed by the war.  The fifteen years that followed 1895 were almost the blackest period in modern Greek history; yet the time was not altogether lost, and such events as the draining of the Kopais-basin by a British company, and its conversion from a malarious swamp into a rich agricultural area, marked a perceptible economic advance.

This comparative stagnation was broken at last by the Young Turk pronunciamiento at Salonika in 1908, which produced such momentous repercussions all through the Nearer East.  The Young Turks had struck in order to forestall the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, but the opportunity was seized by every restive element within it to extricate itself, if possible, from the Turkish coils.  Now, just as in 1897, Greece was directly affected by the action of the Greek population in Krete.  As a result of the revolt of 1896-7, Krete had been constituted an autonomous state subject to Ottoman suzerainty, autonomy and suzerainty alike being guaranteed by four great powers.  Prince George of Greece, a son of the King of the Hellenes, had been placed at the head of the autonomous government as high commissioner; but his autocratic tendency caused great discontent among the free-spirited Kretans, who had not rid themselves of the Turkish regime in order to forfeit their independence again in another fashion.  Dissension culminated in 1906, when the leaders of the opposition took to the mountains, and obtained such support and success in the guerrilla fighting that followed, that they forced Prince George to tender his resignation.  He was succeeded as high commissioner by Zaimis, another citizen of the Greek kingdom, who inaugurated a more constitutional regime, and in 1908 the Kretans believed that the moment for realizing the national ideal had come.  They proclaimed their union with Greece, and elected deputies to the Parliament at Athens.  But the guarantor powers carried out their obligations by promptly sending a combined naval expedition, which hauled down the Greek flag at Canea, and prevented the deputies from embarking for Peiraeus.  This apparently pedantic insistence upon the status quo was extremely exasperating to Greek nationalism.  It produced a ferment in the kingdom, which grew steadily for nine months, and vented itself in July 1909 in the coup d’etat of the ’Military League’, a second-hand imitation of the Turkish ’Committee of Union and Progress’.  The royal family was cavalierly treated, and constitutional