The Turkish government has revised the sixty-first article of the Treaty of Berlin, and the other signatory Powers have silently consented to it. The following is the Turkish revision: “The sublime Porte engages to realize without delay such maltreatments, persecutions, oppressions, outrages, cruelties, and murders in the provinces inhabited by the Armenians, and guarantees the security of their enemies, the Kurds, Circassians and the Turks, and will acquit them in case of their being brought to justice, and will assist them in case the Armenians rise against them in self-defense, by force of arms, and will declare the Christians as rebels. It, moreover, undertakes to make known to the civilized and Christian powers from time to time, that Mohammedanism and barbarism go hand in hand.” This is just what Turkey has been doing with the silent consent of the European Powers. Of course, Turkey is the chief criminal in the case and the other Powers have been accessories of her crime. And England’s share of that crime is confessed by the best of England’s sons: “The only effect of the Anglo-Turkish convention has been to increase the confidence of the sultan that he can do as he pleases in Armenia notwithstanding Article LXI of the Berlin Treaty. “England, therefore, is responsible in three ways. She destroyed the Russian guarantee exacted by the Treaty of San Stefano. She framed the ‘watching’ clause of the Berlin Treaty, and then, to preclude all possibility of effective pressure upon the Turk, she concludes the Cyprus convention which established an illegal British protectorate over the Asiatic dominions of the Sultan.”[109] “In the field of Eastern politics generally the conspicuous result has been the failure--the complete, humiliating, and irretrievable failure--of the traditional policy pursued by England of supporting the Turk against Russia. That policy, first attempted by Mr. Pitt, in 1791, against the vehement protests of Mr. Burke[110] but presently abandoned, was warmly espoused by Lord Palmerston. It prompted the Crimean war of 1853, and was embodied in the Treaty of Paris of 1856. It had the lifelong support of Lord Beaconsfield, who by refusing to join Russia, Austria, and Prussia in 1876 in applying pressure to the sultan, brought on the war of 1877. Public opinion in Great Britain, outraged by the Bulgarian massacre, prevented him from giving the armed support of Great Britain to the Turks in that year. But he was able to revert to and enforce that policy in the negotiations of 1878, which substituted the Treaty of Berlin for the Treaty of San Stefano, and it dictated the provisions of the Anglo-Turkish convention.”[111]