"I impressed upon His Excellency (said Pasha) as forcibly as I could that the only safe course for the Turkish Government was to authorize the Commission to make a fair and impartial inquiry; that failing this they would be held responsible for the cruelties perpetrated on the Armenians by the local authorities, and that the feeling aroused in Europe was such that if these cruelties were not punished, active interference from without must be looked for." This was an earnest, urgent, emphatic, even threatening appeal: but where was there any warrant for the last threat? There was no ultimatum ready. No nation was going to take up arms against Turkey, England least of all. There was no agreement among them to let England take up the task alone. If there had been, one battleship before Constantinople would have brought the massacres to a speedy close and could have compelled the punishment of the Governors in every vilayet where the horrors of Sassoun had been repeated with increased torment and misery. But the fact remains, and the fact is the thing emphasized, that England and all the Signatory Powers sat in masterly inactivity though with steam up at Salonica and let the deadly work go on. There is only time to notice one question, "Why did not Russia agree to the forcing the Dardanelles and coercing the Turks? The blame for the fiasco must fall upon Russia." How so? Could you reasonably expect Russia to assist England in performing her promises to protect Armenia when you remember the humiliation of the Berlin Treaty? If England entered into engagements she was powerless to make good, whose fault was that? And when the implicit appeal was to her Christian sympathy the Russians replied in their press: "Where were all these glorious virtues of Englishmen when Lord Beaconsfield handed back the Christian subjects of the Sultan to the dismal fate which has only now begun to excite their pity, when an improvement would suit their policy and further their designs? If England continued to be both humane and Christian while suppressing those noble impulses eighteen years ago, it is hard to understand why we can not remain both, while holding them in control to-day." To those who deny to Russia any disinterested motives of Christian sympathy in her war with Turkey to deliver Bulgaria from the horrible misrule of the Sultan, this refusal will furnish only another illustration of her being what they consider her, viz: a half-civilized nation. But for England to look to a Power she considers her mortal enemy as regards the occupation of Constantinople, for help to rescue the Armenians from Kurd and Circassian and Turkish regulars, set upon them by the Porte, is the sublimity of political innocence, or the confession of utter weakness. The Russian Bear smiled at the innocence, and with grim satisfaction, perhaps, allowed the Turk to wave back the fleets of the allied Powers from the straits of the Dardanelles and continue his fiendish massacres.