Do you know, my dear young friends, that you and I ought to be very glad and grateful that we are Americans?

Does it ever occur to you that while millions of people in other lands are to-day suffering unspeakably from cruelty and oppression, it is your happy lot to live under a government which makes such wrongs impossible?

You have seen what Cuba is willing to suffer, if she can only get away from the oppression of Spain.  You have seen that she considers no sacrifices too great, that she will surrender fortune, happiness, and life itself, will endure lingering tortures and death in solitary dungeons; and all this, just that she may secure the very freedom which you and I enjoy so carelessly!

And now, from the Southeastern end of Europe, there has come another supplicating voice, from another island.

The little island of Crete, in the grasp of a hand infinitely more cruel than Spain’s, has declared she would rather perish than remain longer at the mercy of the Turk.

What could such a little atom of a country do alone?  One can only wonder that she ever dared to dream of freedom!  But a desire for freedom makes frail, weak bodies marvellously strong sometimes.  She resolved that she would not longer endure the Turkish yoke; and she called to her old kinsmen in Greece to come and take her into their Christian kingdom.  She said:  “We are the same in race and in religion, let us become one in country, too.”

This is not the first despairing cry that has come from the Sultan’s dominions.  Again and again have they rung through Europe in the last century.

The rule of the Ottoman Empire (or Turkey) is the most corrupt, cruel, and degrading in the world.  We have seen that Spain is grasping, avaricious, and a hard mother to her distant Colonies, which she treats like slaves rather than children.  But for all that Spain is brave and chivalric.  She has a sense of honor and of justice, even if she violates it, and—­she is Christian.

But Turkey—­Mohammedan Turkey, has not one of these qualities.  She has no conscience, no shame, no remorse for terrible deeds done; indeed, the murder of Christians is the surest and swiftest passport to her heaven!  Thousands and thousands of Christians perish by the sword every year in the Ottoman Empire, and awful cruelties are committed every day upon the living.

Now you ask why the Christian nations of Europe permit these things to be; and you naturally suppose it goes on because they cannot help it.  Not at all.

Any one of the great nations of Europe could sweep the decaying old Mohammedan Empire out of existence in one campaign; and the six combined Powers, England, Russia, Austria, Germany, France, and Italy, could do it in six hours!  Then why do they not?

Simply because Turkey occupies the most important and valuable strategical position on the earth.  And each of these great nations is in mortal fear that some of the others will get possession of it.