something more tyrannical even than the dull pigheadedness of Prussianism.  I mean the most atrocious of all tortures, which is called caprice.  It is the thing we feel in the Arabian tales, when no man knows whether the Sultan is good or bad, and he gives the same Vizier a thousand pounds or a thousand lashes.  I have heard Dr. Glazebrook describe a whole day of hideous hesitation, in which fugitives for whom he pleaded were allowed four times to embark and four times were brought back again to their prison.  There is something there dizzy as well as dark, a whirlpool in the very heart of Asia; and something wilder than our own worst oppressions in the peril of those men who looked up and saw above all the power of Asiatic arms, their hopes hanging on a rocking mind like that of a maniac.  The tyrant let them go at last, avowedly out of a simple sentiment for the white hair of the consul, and the strange respect that many Moslems feel for the minister of any religion.  Once at least the trembling rock of barbaric rule nearly fell on him and killed him.  By a sudden movement of lawlessness the Turkish military authorities sent to him, demanding the English documents left in his custody.  He refused to give them up; and he knew what he was doing.  In standing firm he was not even standing like Nurse Cavell against organised Prussia under the full criticism of organised Europe.  He was rather standing in a den of brigands, most of whom had never heard of the international rules they violated.  Finally by another freak of friendliness they left him and his papers alone; but the old man had to wait many days in doubt, not knowing what they would do, since they did not know themselves.  I do not know what were his thoughts, or whether they were far from Palestine and all possibilities that tyranny might return and reign for ever.  But I have sometimes fancied that, in that ghastly silence, he may have heard again only the guns of Lee and the last battle in the Wilderness.

If the mention of the American Consul refers back to the oppression of the past, the mention of the Military Governor brings back all the problems of the present.  Here I only sketch these groups as I first found them in the present; and it must be remembered that my present is already past.  All this was before the latest change from military to civil government, but the mere name of Colonel Storrs raises a question which is rather misunderstood in relation to that change itself.  Many of our journalists, especially at the time of the last and worst of the riots, wrote as if it would be a change from some sort of stiff militarism to a liberal policy akin to parliamentarism.  I think this a fallacy, and a fallacy not uncommon in journalism, which is professedly very much up to date, and actually very much behind the times.  As a fact it is nearly four years behind the times, for it is thinking in terms of the old small and rigidly professional army.  Colonel Storrs is the very last man to be called militaristic