She received Cyprus by secret convention, and now holds it as the price of innocent blood. The rewards of iniquity are in her hand. It was worse than folly; it was the refinement of cruelty to send a commission to investigate the outrages in Armenia, thereby irritating the Turk to the height of possible fury as his deeds were proclaimed to the world and then leave him free to wreak his compressed wrath upon the Christians for whose protection no hand would be uplifted. The Powers saw Armenia in misery, bleeding, dying, and passed by on the other side, saying, we are bound by the terms of the Berlin Treaty not to interfere with Turkey in the administration of her domestic affairs; we are sorry for you; we wish the Sultan would listen to our advice and not be quite so severe in his chastisement, but really you must have given him some cause for his anger. Yes, such provocation as the lamb gave to the wolf that charged it with soiling the water, though it was drinking much farther down the stream. The humiliation of England as one of the Great Powers was complete when in the House of Commons March 16th, in reply to questions that were put to him Mr. Curzon Under Secretary of Foreign Affairs was obliged to say that reports received by the Government confirmed the statements that a great number of forced conversions from Christianity to Islamism were still being made in Asia Minor. Under the circumstances of cruelty and systematic debauchery of defenceless Christian women through the devastated districts of Anatolia, he said, the British Consuls in Asia Minor had been instructed to report such cases, and representations in regard to them were constantly being made to the Government in Constantinople. Representations were constantly being made! What did the Porte care for representations? How England was compelled to quaff the contempt even of the Turk who laughs or sneers as his mood may be over these representations of English Consuls and missionaries. The Sublime Porte--which means the Sultan--cabled the Turkish Legation at Washington to deny most emphatically the statements that appeared in the American religious press regarding forcible conversions to Islam. The Sublime Porte affirmed that "the stories related therein are mere inventions of revolutionists, and their friends intended to attract the sympathy of credulous people. There is no forcible conversion to Islamism in Turkey and no animosity against Protestantism." This is sublime impudence. The statements thus contradicted, represented conditions certified to by official reports, by careful investigations made by correspondents of newspapers in England and the United States, and by hundreds of private letters from persons in the region where the massacres occurred. Moreover, this declaration of the Sultan is contradicted by centuries of Mohammedan history, by the ruins of ancient churches throughout all Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, and by daily prayer concerning the Christians:--