It will be noted that the Sultan's communication contained no denial that there are wrongs to be remedied in the administration of his government in Armenia and elsewhere. There is no plea that the terms of solemn treaty obligations have been observed. The letter is a tacit confession that the interposition of the Powers as far as it had gone was justifiable and that the reports of the atrocities in Asia Minor, which were at first strenuously denied by the Turkish Government, were true. It was only a shrewd plea of helplessness to persuade the Powers not to enforce their demands and nothing more. In his rejoinder to the Sultan's letter, Lord Salisbury substantially admits the hopelessness of reform under the Sultan's government as now constituted and administered. A few days after this correspondence the fear of the Sultan seemed to have vanished, and he was brave enough to refuse permission to the Powers to send extra guardboats into the Bosphorus. At this time it looked as if Sir Philip Currie, the British Ambassador, would act alone, and that he really meant to force the passage of the Dardanelles. But the Sultan knew he would not dare to do it, and he knew also that the Powers were not agreed to use force. England proved herself impotent before the crafty diplomacy of the timid Sultan. It is folly at this day to pretend to believe that the Sultan ever intended of his "spontaneous good-will" to protect the Armenians even as human beings from the cruelty of Kurd or Turkish officials. The horrors of December and January give the lie direct to every promise made at Constantinople. The Sultan had outwitted England, if indeed England ever were in earnest, and by circulating a rumor of a Turco-Russian alliance, most effectually checked all danger of intervention by force--the only argument to which the Turk will ever yield--and proceeded to commit yet greater crimes if that were possible. Under the very eyes of the Russian, English, and French delegates at Moush, the witnesses who had the courage to speak the truth to the representatives of the Powers were thrown into prison, and not a hand was raised to protect them: and within a stone's throw of the foreign consuls and the missionaries, loyal Armenians were being hung up by the heels, the hair of their heads and beards plucked out one by one, their bodies branded with red-hot irons, and defiled in beastly ways, and their wives and daughters dishonored before their very eyes. And all that philanthropic England has to offer its protégés, for whose protection she holds Cyprus as a pledge, is eloquent sympathy.