Mr. Cleveland has been unfortunate in his advisers, partly chosen by himself, and partly inherited. Minister Terrill has taken the word of the Sultan and the palace clique, and made no attempt to investigate for himself; consequently he is full of respect for the Mohammedans, and scorn for the Armenians. Admiral Kirtland visited a few seaports, found the Armenians there working as usual (of course--the massacres were carried on where news could be intercepted and suppressed by the Turks), and reports that he didn't find any evidence of outrages or disorders, and considers the stories false, or much exaggerated. And such lazy or prejudiced negatives as these are to be counted as outweighing the sworn official reports of consuls on the spot, and of pitiful letters from the survivors among the very victims themselves! I have said that Mr. Cleveland does not lack firmness. He does not in internal policy, but he certainly did not show enough in the matter of these atrocities. The Sultan asked him to nominate a commissioner to join those of other powers in investigating the Sassoun massacres. He appointed Milo A. Jewett, consul at Sivas; but Mr. Jewett was much too keen and forcible a man for the Sultan, who refused to let him take his place on the commission. Mr. Cleveland did not insist, as he ought. The very fact that the Sultan did not want it, was the best of reasons for persisting. Again, last year, the Senate voted to send two more consuls to Armenia; Mr. Cleveland appointed Messrs. Chilton and Hunter to go to Erzeroum and Harpoot respectively, but the Sultan refused to accept them, and they had to come back. To consent to this was wrong and weak; the American government should firmly declare its right to protect its own interests in its own way. But the President will act if the American people will stand at his back. When will they send forth a mandate that these horrors must stop? VI. THE CAUSES OF THE ATROCITIES. THE GREAT QUESTION. The Armenian atrocities can never be fully understood by those who may be born in a free land, where there are no Turks, no Kurds, no Circassians, no Georgians, no Zeibecks, and no Mohammedan religion, with its oppressions and persecutions. Why the Sultan orders the Turks, Kurds, or other followers to destroy the Armenians, whereby more than 100,000 of them have recently been killed, and 500,000 been rendered homeless and left to die of starvation in the streets and fields, or why the Sultan ordered all who are spared to accept the Mohammedan religion, is never referred to with any sort of correctness by the newspapers or periodicals in their accounts of the dreadful atrocities taking place in Armenia, and therefore the people are left in ignorance and doubt respecting the true situation both as to the causes and the atrocities themselves. FIRST CAUSE.