We have it on the authority of Professor Arminius Vambéry that the Czar Alexander III had given assurances of his friendship and support to Sultan Abdul Hamid; and there are not wanting political students who affirm that the Armenian Massacres were in part instigated by Russian politicians who saw, or professed to see, in a free Armenia an impediment to Russia’s advance in the south and a fostering of the spirit of independence in the Russian provinces of Armenia.[9] This on the authority of Mr. James Bryce was the reason which Prince Lobanoff assigned for his refusal to give support to British proposals of coercion towards Turkey. “On January 16, 1896,” so writes Mr. Bryce, “when the massacres had gone on for more than three months, he (Prince Lobanoff) ‘saw nothing to destroy his confidence in the bonne volonté of the Sultan, who was’ (”he felt assured“) ‘doing his best.’” And Mr. Bryce continues to add “Turkey, which in 1877 had looked to England for help against Russia, now turned to Russia for support against the menaces of England.” We have it also on the authority of Mr. Bryce that shortly after the terrible and cold-blooded massacre of Armenians at Constantinople “the German Ambassador presented to the Sultan a picture of the German Imperial family which he had asked for some time ago”[10] and the friendship of Kaiser Wilhelm for Abdul Hamid “his friend and brother,” as an American writer has called him; the costly gifts presented by the ex-Sultan to the German Imperial family, the magnificent reception of the Kaiser at Constantinople, and the still more magnificent concession of Turkish territory to Germany, are too well known to the world to need any further comment. Thus it became the fate of the unfortunate Armenians to be the bruised and mangled shuttle-cock of powerful bats. [Illustration: NERSES VARJABETIAN. (Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople).] Much has been written and much has been said by great authorities, (far more comprehensively and by pens much more forcible than my humble efforts could aspire to reach) against the selfishness and callousness, the inhumanity and cynicism of those great powers which have coldly looked on and permitted the hellish atrocities and horrors of the Armenian Massacres. The name of William Ewart Gladstone is loved and revered by Armenians all over the world; but the thunderings of that veteran statesman and the denouncing protests of those thoughtful men whose feelings of revolted humanity have made themselves heard in sounding language, have fallen on stony ground; they have been like the voices of men crying out in the wilderness. Europe has turned a deaf ear to the condemnations of justice and truth, even as she has turned a deaf ear to the voice of Rahel weeping for her slaughtered children.