England, by commanding the substitution of the Treaty of Berlin in place of that of San Stefano had taken upon herself the heaviest obligations any nation could incur. It is unnecessary to repeat that those obligations were never fulfilled. If the lamented death of the Emperor Alexander II was one of the most unhappy events that could have befallen Russia; it was a hundredfold more unhappy for the Armenian nation. His successor, who adopted repressive and coercive measures for his own people in the place of his father’s liberal policy, not only applied the same measures to his Armenian subjects in his own domains, but left their countrymen under Turkish rule to their merciless fate. Russia, twice foiled in her subjugation of Turkey, changed her policy from that of crushing into that of upholding the Ottoman Empire. When the horrors of the Armenian massacres, revealed to the people of England by their own ambassadors and consuls, their own journalists and men of letters, thrilled the hearts of men and women, when England’s “Grand Old Man” thundered his vituperations against the “Great Assassin,”[5] Prince Lobanoff in answer to British proposals of coercion towards Turkey, conveyed Russia’s intentions in his warning note to the Salisbury Government, and England, who in 1878 had rivetted the Turkish yoke on the necks of the Armenians, to use the words of an eminent British authority on Turkish affairs, “wrung her hands and submitted.”[6] The same authority tells us that the _coup de grace_ to the intervention of the Concert of Europe in Armenian affairs was given by Prince Bismarck, “who in 1883 intimated to the British Government, in terms of cynical frankness and force, that Germany cared nothing about the matter, and that it had better be allowed to drop.” Thus the Concert of Europe, under whose aegis the aspiring Armenians foolishly and fondly hoped to recover National Autonomy, became the cause of dealing out to the struggling nation, not security from Turkish oppression, but instead fire, famine and slaughter, a slaughter to which were added devilish ingenuity of torture, and the loathsome horrors of Turkish prisons. If before the Treaty of Berlin the Armenians had suffered from various phases of Turkish oppression, they had at least not been pursued with the relentless fury that followed, until the soil of the fatherland was soaked, and reeked and steamed with the life-blood of its slaughtered sons and daughters; until women and children were done to their death under the most hideous and revolting circumstances, and tender youths and cultured men of letters rotted in Turkish dungeons.