Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. TIMID COUNSELS. It seems to be thought in some quarters in this country—Madame Novikoff has done her best to propagate the same view in Russia and France— that Lord Salisbury's record on the Eastern question has placed him in a peculiarly disadvantageous position for coming to an agreement with Russia at this moment. I hope in a following chapter to prove, on the contrary, that Russia is under deep obligations to Lord Salisbury. But let me begin by explaining as clearly as I can the policy which I venture to recommend for public meetings and elsewhere. It is to assure Lord Salisbury that he has the whole nation at his back in any measure which he may take for the effectual protection of the Armenians, and for delivering England from all further complicity in the policy of futile remonstrance and criminal inaction, which has already sacrificed the lives of some 100,000 innocent men, women, and children, massacred in cold blood; and will, probably, if persevered in, result in a general massacre of Christians all over Turkey. If the40 Advice of Sir Charles Dilke Concert of the Powers agree to act with Lord Salisbury in putting an end without delay to a state of things which has already covered Christendom with infamy, well and good. If not, then perish the Concert of the Powers ! At this moment shiploads of Armenians are being deported before the eyes of the Ambassadors to be drowned at sea or massacred in some obscure corner of Anatolia. And the Ambassadors do nothing to stay the hand of the assassin. And then we are told, forsooth ! by some weak-kneed and invertebrate politicians that England must only bewail her impotence and sit wringing her feeble hands in the Concert of Europe. Can she not at least leave the Concert, shaking the dust of her garments against...