One of the saddest aspects of this Turkish piracy is the not infrequent mention of men who either from fear or from love of adventure had denied their religion and nationality to become renegades. It is easy enough to criticise those who were made so to act by compulsion and heartrending tortures, such as placing a man flat on the ground and then piling weights on to the top of his body till life’s breath was almost crushed out of him: or thrashing him without mercy till he would consent to become a Moslem. The ideal man, of course, will in every instance prefer martyrdom to saving his life by the sacrifice of principles. But when the matter is pressed home to us as individuals we may well begin to wonder whether we should have played the man, as some of our ancestors did, or whether we should, after much torturing, have succumbed to the temptation of clinging to life at the critical moment. Of those renegades some were undoubtedly thorough-paced rascals, who were no credit to any community, but mere worthless men without a spark of honour. Such as these would as soon become Moslems as Christians, provided it suited their mode of life. But it was the knowledge of the sufferings of the other English prisoners which, with the loss of ships and merchandise, caused the Government repeatedly to send out those punitive expeditions. One would have thought that the only effective remedy would have been to have left a permanent Mediterranean squadron to patrol the North African coast and to chase the corsairs throughout at least the entire summer season. But there were many reasons which prevented this. The ships could not be spared; there were the long-drawn-out Anglo-Dutch wars, and it was not English ships and seamen exclusively that were the objects of these attacks. But, if by any means some continuous arrangement between the Christian powers had been possible whereby the North African coast could have been systematically patrolled, there is little doubt but that endless effort, time, money, lives, ships, commerce and human suffering might have been saved. To-day, for instance, if piracy along that shore were ever to break out again in a serious manner with ships such as might harass the great European liners trading to the Mediterranean, the matter would speedily be settled, if not by the British Mediterranean squadron, at least by some international naval force, as the Boxer troubles in China were dealt with.