tal moment are involved. A present generation is trustee
for its successors, and may be faithless to its charge quite as truly
by inaction as by action, by omission as by commission. Failure to
improve opportunity, where just occasion arises, may entail upon
posterity problems and difficulties which, if overcome at all--it may
then be too late--will be so at the cost of blood and tears that
timely foresight might have spared. Such preventive measures, if
taken, are in no true sense offensive but defensive. Decadent
conditions, such as we observe in Turkey--and not in Turkey
alone--cannot be indefinitely prolonged by opportunist counsels or
timid procrastination. A time comes in human affairs, as in physical
ailments, when heroic measures must be used to save the life of a
patient or the welfare of a community; and if that time is allowed to
pass, as many now think that it was at the time of the Crimean war,
the last state is worse than the first,--an opinion which these
passing days of the hesitancy of the Concert and the anguish of
Greece, not to speak of the Armenian outrages, surely indorse. Europe,
advancing in distant regions, still allows to exist in her own side,
unexcised, a sore that may yet drain her life-blood; still leaves in
recognized dominion, over fair regions of great future import, a
system whose hopelessness of political and social improvement the
lapse of time renders continually more certain,--an evil augury for
the future, if a turning tide shall find it unchanged, an outpost of
barbarism ready for alien occupation.

It is essential to our own good, it is yet more essential as part of
our duty to the commonwealth of peoples to which we racially belong,
that we look with clear, dispassionate, but resolute eyes upon the
fact that civilizations on different planes of material prosperity and
progress, with different spiritual ideals, and with very different
political capacities, are fast closing together. It is a condition not
unprecedented in the history of the world. When it befell a great
united empire, enervated by long years of unwarlike habits among its
chief citizens, it entailed ruin, but ruin deferred through centuries,
thanks to the provision made beforehand by a great general and
statesman. The Saracenic and Turkish invasions, on the contrary, after
generations of advance, were first checked, and then rolled back; for
they fell upon peoples, disunited indeed by internal discords and
strife,