All the evidence received this week from Constantinople points to
the direct complicity of the Sultan in the massacre
of the Armenians, which covered at least six thousand persons. Not one or two, but twenty or more witnesses of re- pute saw the police and soldiers stand idly by while unresisting traders, clerks, and porters were being slaughtered wholesale, and the bodies being carried to the shore and then conveyed in vessels and barges out to sea. The assassins, too, had all been armed beforehand, and it is by no means certain that the Palace was not aware that some Armenian explosion was at hand. Thousands of Armenians have also been expelled, to be murdered comfortably in the provinces, and thousands more are flying penniless and almost starving to the ports of the Mediterranean. No one in the capital doubts the Sultan's guilt, or his intention to kill out the race, not even the Ambassadors, who on August 27th forwarded a telegram, signed by them all, direct to Abd-ul-Hamid. "We regret events here. They must cease instantly,—otherwise they will cause damage ( porteront prejudice) to Turkey and tc your dynasty." That is the telegram at which "the Sultan was much moved," and it certainly conveys a direct menace, but nothing whatever has been done. Only the massacres have stopped at the Sultan's order. The report of the American Ambassador to Washington will soon give the world the whole facts, and it is greatly to be regretted that a copy, say one transmitted to London, could not by a calculated indiscretion be published at once.
