Weigh each for himself the responsibility of each of the Great Powers in any scales he may choose, distribute the guilt by a different judgment, and yet the failure of these Christian nations to unite for the deliverance of Christian Armenia from the barbarous and cruel, most lustful and brutal outrages under which they were suffering, will be stamped by history as the most awful crime against humanity upon which the sun ever gazed during all the passing years of the nineteenth century, and only to be paralleled by the apathy of Western Europe, when alone in 1453 Constantinople fought her last battle for the cross and fell under the sword and power of Islam. CHAPTER XVIII. AMERICA'S DUTY AND PRIVILEGE. Our self-imposed task to voice as clearly and strongly as we could the History and Horrors of Armenia under the Curse of Islam is nearly finished. For many weeks the fires have burned hot within us, and the daily news from the land of sorrows has only made our heart beat more rapidly and our pen fly the faster that our appeal might reach your ears while yet there was time to save from utter destruction a remnant of this most ancient Christian people of whom two hundred thousand now look to England and America for daily bread. "The Armenians are the representatives of one of the oldest civilized Christian races, being beyond all doubt one of the most pacific, one of the most industrious, and one of the most intelligent races in the world." --Gladstone. In all the history of the Roman Empire, from Nero down to the days of Constantine, there is no chapter so cruel, so terrible as the atrocious crimes of the present Turkish Empire. These massacres have been committed at the command of the Sultan, and with flourish of trumpets, as at Zilleh, when at noon November 28, 1895, the trumpet was blown and the Turks began to assault the Christians with the cry, "Down with Armenians. This is the Sultan's order." This is the Curse of Islam that it makes it the religious duty of every follower of the prophet, from the Sultan down to the howling dervishes, to hate the Christians, to kill and plunder, rob, outrage and torture every one who will not accept the faith of Mohammed. The evident intention of the Sultan is to utterly destroy and exterminate the Christian people in Armenia. It is reserved for the dawning of the twentieth century to see all the horrors of the conquests of Tamerlane repeated, and to realize for itself what these Christian races have suffered since the fateful year 1453, when Constantinople, the glory of Eastern Europe, fell a prey to hordes of the Ottoman Turks. It is because he has outdone the cruelties of all the ages that caused the foremost of living English poets to stigmatize the reigning Sultan as "Abdul, the Damned."