The daily morning journal and courier., 1896-11-23

fore, and they. should go once again. They went uninVited then to drive the Barbary pirate off the high seas, when all of Europe was paying blackmail to these blaclS-legged buccaneers to be allowed to sail their merchant men around the Cape of Tarlfa, They stood watching each other then as they stand to-day, knowing it Is against history for any European power to give some thing for nothing, to right wrong without gathering in few islands at the same time, or establishing a pro tectorate as part payment for their good offices And while they paid the tolls and hesitated, Decatur, with Q fleet of old-fashioned wooden ships, but flying the American flag, sailed past the Tarifa Straits and drove this soourge of the Middle sea back into their sand-hills and asked no mans permission, nor stopped for reward,
 Are we grown so selfish and sordid since then that with our white squad ron we cannot set a like example to the powers of Europe?
 "We are none of us," says Mir Kip ling, "infalIible, not even the youngest" And no one must gather that am urg- ing any one to a bloody war For there would be no war. The battle ships of the United States could run the Dardanelles, or what would be left of their for!tresses after the first ship passed through, with infinite case, and could line up opposite the Yildiz Kiosk and demand that the massacre should cease with perfect safety to themselves and to the sultan, too. The sultan's ships of war cannot move from their moorings, from which they have been rotting for the last eleven years, and his army magnificent as it is could not swim the Bosphorus. Of course, Rus sia would storm and the sight of the white hulls in the Black Sea would destroy the peace of the ambassadors when those old women met that week | to compose protests, but surely no one | seriously supposes that Russia would go to war with the United States A | man counts the cost of going to war | to-day just as he did long ago, and 1 he probably considers it much more l deeply, too, for it is a much more ex- pensive undertaking now than it was | then. Neither Russia nor any other I power is going to come to blows with the United States without some very | good cause, and the fact that we ob- | ject to people of her own Greek church 1 being massacred in a corner of Asia ] Minor is not a good cause. That is ob- | vious to any one. And rather than go 1 to war she would much prefer sending Christian governor there to restore order and with him a few thousand ] 1yhn np1lIH matters right in a month. She would at first undoubtedly be exceedingly indignant and demand in a most emphatic man. ner that we take our battle-ships out of the Sea of Maumora, and that not until their departure would anything be done for the Armenians. But then something would be done for the Ar menians.
 As no chain Is stronger than its weakest link, so every government, I repeat, should be as strong as the strongest man in it, and if that man happens to be the chief executive what an opportunity 1t offers him to let his | setting sun sink in a sea of glory, to l bring down upon his head before he leaves office the blessings of thousands l of homeless, bounded Christians, and l the approving cheers of the American people. It would be a pleasant thing for him to remember in later years, when the curtains are drawn and the candles lit, and he has leisure time to look back at the things he has done and left undone. Some one has writ ten, Tt is given to very few men to carry a line to a sinking ship or to place flag upon the walls of Luck
 now" It is given even less frequently to one man to stop by a word the butchery of innocent men at the mercy of an insane and royal assassin. He should consider long before he lets that ] chance go by.
 And should any power, temporal or l divine, question his right to do this
 thing, either now or at the Judgment
 Day, he can remember for his better
 comfort the English captain, who pro-
 tected the American filibusterers, and say: q do this not in the name of the
 president of the United States, but in
 the name of common humanity-and 1 that is my answer"
 RICHARD HARDING DAVIS.