Hardly less brilliant were the accounts of “Moslem” cruelty, particularly to prisoners, under whom their captors kindled discomforting fires—a needless labor, for it would have been greatly easier to make the fire on unoccupied ground and superpose the prisoner afterward. The customary rites of parting the heads of women and eviscerating babes were not neglected: all the requirements of invasion received careful attention—as they did in Cuba, as they once did in France, as they previously did in the Southern States of our Union, and before that in the revolted colonies of Great Britain. Edhem Pasha was a strict constructionist of the popular law; as a conscientious invader operating among an inhospitable populace, he thoughtfully gave himself the trouble to be a “butcher”—as Cornwallis was in the Colonies, as Grant was in the South, as Von Moltke was in France, and as Weyler was in Cuba. If it were not for picturesque narratives of tortured prisoners, multisected women, children ingeniously bayoneted and old men fearfully and wonderfully defaced by the hand of an artist, the literature of conquest would lack the salt that keeps it sweet in the memory and the spice that gives it glow. Of course it is all nonsense: cruelties are not practiced in modern wars between civilized nations. (It is true that the Turks, or some of them, are so uncivilized as to have a number of Turkesses each, but that is not visibly bad for them, and appears to be condemned on the ground that it is somehow bad for us.) Indubitably Turkey’s doom as a European Power was long ago pronounced in the Russian language, but she dies with a dignity befitting her glorious history. Foot to foot and sword to sword she struggles with the hosts assailing her, now on this side, and now on that. Against attack by her powerful neighbors and insurrection of her heterogeneous provinces, she has manifested a courage, a vitality, a fertility of resource, a continuity and tenacity of purpose which in a Christian nation would command our respect and engage our enthusiasm. Unfortunately for them, her people worship God in a way that is different from our way, and with a sincerity which in us would be zeal if we had it, but which in them is fanaticism. Therefore they are hateful. Therefore they are unspeakable. Therefore we lie about them and, because of the respectability of the witnesses, believe our own lies. Truth is not in us, nor the sense of its need; charity nor the memory of its primacy among virtues. 1897. CATS OF CHEYENNE