Why is it that the sentimental compassion of England has not gone out into effective help to poor Armenia? For reason of "higher politics." Her interests demand that the Turks and Kurds in whose soulless bodies legions of devils seem to have taken up their abode, shall be protected; the integrity of the Empire and the rule of Islam are essential--indispensable to Christian civilization, i.e., to England's commercial prestige. By the terms of the Berlin Treaty and the occupation of Cyprus, England bound herself to see to it that the Christian peoples under the rule of the Porte should have fair, humane treatment. This has been fully and clearly shown in our chapter on the Russo-Turkish war. At the close of that war (1878) the condition of Armenian Christians was from a humane point of view deplorable. Yet nothing was done--no efficacious step was taken to fulfil that solemn promise. Things were allowed to drift from bad to worse, mismanagement to develop into malignity, oppression merge into persecution, until just as in 1876 most solemn promises of reform were followed by the Bulgarian horrors, so the promises for reforms in Armenia after the Sassoun massacre were followed by the still more terrible atrocities which have not yet ceased. The Turk knew that the powers would not agree in compelling the enforcement of the promises made. Time was needed. Yes time in which to slaughter and to starve the Armenians whom by the treaty of Berlin all the Great Powers were bound to protect in their rights. But the unfortunate action and reaction of the English government made themselves immediately and fatally felt in the very homes and at the fireside of hundreds of thousands of Christian men and women driving them into exile, shutting them up in noisome prisons and subjecting them to every conceivable species of indignity, outrage and death. By pressing a knob in London, as it were, hell's portals were opened in Asia Minor, letting loose legions of fiends in human shape who set about torturing and exterminating the Christians there. Nor was the government ignorant of the wide-reaching effects of its ill-advised action. It is on record that for seventeen years it continued to watch the harrowing results of that action without once interfering to stop it although at any moment during that long period of persecution it could have redeemed its promise and rescued the Christians from their unbearable lot. Mr. Dillon says that if a detailed description were possible of the horrors which England's exclusive attention to her own mistaken interests let loose upon Turkish Armenians, there is not a man within the kingdom of Great Britain whose heart strings would not be touched and thrilled by the gruesome stories of which it would be composed.