These statements are neither rumors nor exaggerations concerning which we are justified in suspending judgment,--though the Turks long denied the reports of the Sassoun massacres. History has set its seal upon them. Diplomacy has slowly verified and reluctantly recognized them as accepted facts. Religion and humanity are now called upon to place their emphatic protest against them on record. The Turks in their confidential moods have admitted these and worse acts of savagery. The Kurds glory in them at all times. Trustworthy Europeans have witnessed them and described them: and the Armenians have groaned over them in blank despair, and the sweat of their anguish has been blood. Officers and nobles in the Sultan's own cavalry regiments like Mostigo the Kurd, glory in the long series of crimes and outrages which have marked their career, and laugh to scorn the idea of being punished for robbing and killing the Armenians whom the Sublime Porte desires them to exterminate. The stories of the Bulgarian atrocities were repeated here. It was the Armenians themselves who were punished if they dared complain when their own relatives or friends were murdered. And often they were punished on the charge of having committed these outrages themselves, or else on the suspicion of having killed the murderers who were afterwards found living and thriving in the Sultan's employ, and were never disturbed there. Three hundred and six of the principal inhabitants of the district of Khnouss in a piteous appeal to the people of England, wrote:-- "Year by year, month by month, day by day, innocent men, women and children have been shot down, stabbed, or clubbed to death in their houses and their fields, tortured in strange fiendish ways in fetid prison cells, or left to rot in exile under the scorching sun of Arabia. During that long and horrible tragedy no voice was raised for mercy, no hand extended to help us. * * * Is European sympathy destined to take the form of a cross over our graves." Now the answer has been given. What an answer! These ill-fated men might know that European sympathy has taken a different form--that of a marine guard before the Sultan's palace to shield him and his from harm from without, while they proceed with their orgies of blood and lust within. They might know; only most of them have been butchered since then, like the relatives and friends whose lot they lamented and yet envied.