We can do this because the Eastern Question does not exist for us. Higher questions of humanity demand the first consideration. We can interfere in defence of the lives and property of Christians in Turkey without violating the Monroe Doctrine and would merit the gratitude of Europe and the world, if the final decision should be that the Sultan had forfeited by the slaughter of one hundred thousand men, women and children with the fiendish accompaniments of outrage, violation, torture, all right to be treated as anything else than an enemy of humanity, and a wild beast to be caged and gazed upon with execration and horror. Are not the lives and happiness of a half million Armenians left homeless and penniless and who still tremble with fear and terror at the sight of their relentless foes of more consequence than the boundary line of Venezuela? And yet for the location of an imaginary line the President's message came perilously near being a threat of war. Had the President written as strong a message as that to the Sultan in November or December, 1895, and sent it with an escort of three battleships under the Stars and Stripes (stars for heroes, stripes for tyrants) demanding that the massacres cease at once or Yildiz Palace would be bombarded, the telegraph wires might have melted under the hot haste with which every Governor had been ordered to call off the hounds of hell from their battening on human blood. (I beg pardon of the hounds, hyenas, tigers and all other wild beasts for using their names in simile or metaphor to describe the swiftness, eagerness or ferocity of Kurd or Turk. It is only the poverty of language that makes such use allowable.) But there is another thing we can do and England has shown us how to do it, scores of times, if not hundreds of times, in her own history. The American Board has suffered the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars in the destruction of missionary property; American citizens have suffered great money losses and their work has been broken up in many quarters; many churches in all parts of Anatolia, built wholly or in part with contributions from America, have been laid in ruins; they have gone down in ashes and pillage under the trampling hordes of Islam; the cost of relief has been enormous and the extra cost to all the missionaries has been very great, to say nothing of all the indignities to which they have been subjected (and in British estimation outrage upon the dignity of an Englishman is placed at very high figures.) Now let these damages be tabulated at full value and the bill presented to the Sublime Porte payable on demand and let us land a few marines at Stamboul and open out a few port holes upon the Palace and wake Mr. Sultan to the fact that it is quite as serious an affair to pluck the feathers of the American eagle as it is to twist the tail of the British lion.