It is possible that a certain number of innocent Armenians may have been killed by the mob who, infuriated and panic-stricken by the reports they had received of the butchery of their co-religionists at Van, and the slaughter of the soldiers at Zeitun, believed that should the Armenians get the upper hand they would suffer in the same manner; but for the fate of these poor victims, or for the excesses committed by the Kurds, it would hardly be just to hold either the Turkish Government or the local Turkish officials responsible. These had done everything possible to disarm the tribes so as to make them amenable to law and order, but despite their endeavours the Kurds were being continually armed by outside agencies. One of the principal causes of the Albanian revolution was the attempt to disarm the mountaineers, and after that experience it is greatly to the credit of the Turkish Government that they still persisted in trying to deprive the Kurds of their rifles. We have no hesitation in repeating that these stories of wholesale massacre have been circulated with the distinct object of influencing, detrimentally to Turkey, the future policy of the British Government when the time of settlement shall arrive. No apology, therefore, is needed for honestly endeavouring to show how a nation with whom we were closely allied for many years and which possesses the same faith as millions of our fellow-subjects, has been condemned for perpetrating horrible excesses against humanity on “evidence” which, when not absolutely false, is grossly and shamefully exaggerated. During the Boer war the most horrible charges were made on the Continent against the conduct of our troops. One picture, for example, in the then famous and widely circulated French _Assiette de Beurre_, showed a number of British soldiers lining a trench and firing on the advancing Boers, who were unable to reply because a number of their own women-folk were tied to stakes along the front of the British trenches. By pictures such as these the fury of the European nations was roused against us, and there was hardly a single one we could call a friend. Turkey, however, stood true: thousands of her Moslem subjects volunteered to fight for us, and prayers were offered up in her mosques for the success of the British arms. And over a score of influential Moslems, headed by Obeid-Ullah Effendi, formerly Minister of Education for Syria and to-day a member of the Ottoman Legislative Assembly, attended at the British Embassy at Pera, and there openly made prayers for the success of the British Arms in South Africa.