A comparison of Sir Henry Layard’s despatch to Lord Derby on the “Bulgarian Atrocities,” dated 1877, with Sir Mark Sykes’ account of the happenings which commenced with the disturbances at Zeitun in 1895, show exactly how both these events originated and were grossly exaggerated. The history of every alleged massacre in Turkey is almost the same, whether we consider the Bulgarian “atrocities” in 1876, the disturbances in Sassun in 1896, those in Constantinople in the same year, or those at Van in 1915. In every case we find the same charges of connivance by local officials acting under orders from Constantinople, the same gross exaggerations and the same stories of bestiality, in which the traducers of the Turks seem to take a special delight. And it is these same people, as the _Near East_ said in a leading article, who compel the Turks “to listen to sermons about disorders which were deliberately fomented by the preachers themselves or by men preaching in their name.” Referring, to these “hellish” and “unutterable” forms of torture of which the Turks are so freely accused, ‘Odysseus’ says: These are often spoken of as being so terrible that the details cannot be given in print, but I believe them to be largely the invention of morbid and somewhat prurient brains. Medical testimony makes it certain that no human being could survive the tortures which some Armenians are said to have suffered without dying. Sir Henry Layard wrote as follows to Lord Derby: