No one believes that gentlemen in the position of Lord Bryce, Mr. Noel Buxton, Mr. Aneurin Williams and Sir Edwin Pears would for a minute willingly deceive the British public; but it is indeed more than possible that some “well-known hand” has been deceiving them. May not this hand have been that of the wealthy Armenian Committees which are spread over Europe and America, and who have never hesitated as to the means chosen for the attainment of their objects, because with them the end justifies the means? Even the Earl of Crewe, when on October the 5th, 1915, he replied in the House of Lords to the Earl of Cromer’s question as to “whether His Majesty’s Government had received any information confirmatory of the statements made in the Press to the effect that renewed massacres of Armenians had taken place on a large scale,” based his information on a report he had received from His Majesty’s Consul at Batum, and which he acknowledged was founded upon the statements published in a newspaper at Tiflis. It is certainly most significant that the British Consul at Batum,—a town actually on the frontier—should have had to rely for his information on a newspaper published at Tiflis, nearly 200 miles further back. This newspaper was probably “The Horizon,” an Armenian propagandist organ, and therefore quite unreliable. Likewise, unless he had been wilfully misinformed, it would be difficult to account for Lord Bryce’s statement at the Mansion House, that there was not the slightest basis for the report that the Armenians had themselves provoked the massacre by rising in conspiracy. The facts and probabilities, so far as we know them, are otherwise. The Turks had just sustained in the Caucasus a severe defeat. They needed every available man and every round of ammunition to check the advancing Russians. It is therefore incredible that without receiving any provocation they should have chosen that particularly inopportune moment to employ a large force of soldiers and gendarmes with artillery to stir up a hornet’s nest in their rear. Military considerations alone make the suggestion absurd.