This week a mild surprise has been caused by the sending of the French fleet to Turkish waters. The callous lethargy, which a sense of duty, a chivalrous sympathy with the weak and the oppressed, could not dispel, has yielded to a financial exigency. Two naturalized citizens are creditors of the Sultan for a large sum. It is true they have been receiving most usurious interest these last fifteen years, but now Lorando and Turbini wish to recover their capital; and lo! the might of France is put forth on their behalf! It is said that M. Waldeck Rousseau, the Premier, is professionally interested in the matter, and will receive a fee even bigger than the one he earned when he saved his clients in the Panama scandal, who are now in the seats of the mighty. The long-suffering French taxpayer will grudgingly pay the expenses of this naval demonstration, and the Porte will promptly pay up in order to be rid of his unwelcome visitors. But France does not mean to be a simple collector for MM. Lorando and Turbini. The elections of 1902 are at hand, and the semi-Jacobins in power are anxious to obtain the suffrages of the better element, and not be entirely carried away captive by their Socialist and ultra-Jacobin supporters, through whom they have seized the reins of government. The Crimean war, as I have shown in _Slav and Moslem_, was partly brought about by a similar preoccupation on the part of Napoleon III, who had just made himself emperor by an infamous _coup d’état_. Voltairean France had allowed her protectorate over the Eastern Christians to fall into desuetude, and Russia supplanted her. But when the latter exercised her treaty-acquired rights, France and England combined against her. To-day with impudent inconsistency the Third Republic, which has done its utmost, these thirty years, to dechristianize France, sees fit to exact from the Porte that French religious schools be allowed to multiply freely, and that its protectorate over Eastern Christians be distinctly recognized. What is more, the Republic demands that the Catholic University of Beyruth deliver diplomas entitling the recipients to practise medicine in all parts of the Turkish empire. Now, considering that the Third Republic has just made a most iniquitous law against religious congregations, depriving French parents of the means of educating their children in accordance with their faith, it is a grotesque incongruity that the Turks should be compelled to harbour these congregations and their schools, which are being closed in France with a latent view to establishing a Government monopoly of education. This university of Beirut, and practically all the French schools and hospitals in Turkey, are under the direction of Jesuits, Dominicans, Assumptionists, etc., and they are of great importance to French influence, as they implant this language and the love of a nation that has such admirable sons and daughters.