The following incident in the career of Gen. B. F. Butler was given as a newspaper item. In the course of a very spirited conversation one day a gentleman called him a knave. The general smiled and replied, "Well, did you ever hear anybody say that I was a fool?" Somebody was surely fooled by this convention. Who was it? Not Russia and certainly not the Turk. Who then? Salisbury? or England? There were many men even in England who did not hesitate to express hottest indignation against the policy of the Government regarding her dealings with Turkey. Here are paragraphs from "The Ottoman Power in Europe" by the English historian E. A. Freeman: "The England of Canning and Codrington, the England of Byron and Hastings has come to this, that the world knows us as the nation which upholds oppression for the sake of its own interests. We have indeed a national sin to redress and atone for. We are verily guilty concerning our brother, in that we saw the anguish of his soul when he besought us and we would not hear. Nay, our guilt is deeper still. We have not merely looked on and passed by on the other side, but we have given our active help to the oppressors of our brothers. We have "upheld" the foulest fabric of wrong that earth ever saw, because it was deemed that the interests of England were involved in upholding the wrong and trampling down the right. * * * * "Our national crime is that we have upheld the Turk for our own supposed interests. For these we have doomed the struggling nations to abide in their bondage. We have doomed them to stay under a rule under which the life and property of the Christian, the honor of his wife, the honor of his children of both sexes alike are at every moment at the mercy of the savages whom our august and cherished ally honors and promotes in proportion to the blackness of their deeds. We have for our own interests upheld the power which has done its foul and bloody work in Chios, at Damascus and in Bulgaria, which is still doing the same foul and bloody work wherever a victim may be found. We uphold the power whose daily work is massacre and worse than massacre. It matters not whether ten thousand or twenty thousand perish. We are still to uphold the slaughterer, for it is to our interest that he should not be shorn of his power of slaughtering.