p. 437 | TURKEY'S FRIENDS

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 10, 1900

TURKEY'S FRIENDS.

New York Tribune.

“HOWEVER much Turkey may wrong the United States, American ships are not to pass the straits in order to exact redress from Constantinople, under penalty of being blown out of the water by Russian, German, and Austrian ships.”

This is the deduction drawn by the Spectator, which, in the course of a long article based on the anti-American utterances of the Listok, of Odessa, deals with the alleged hatred of America by the Continental powers, especially Russia. The Spectator continues:—

“The main cause of this, no doubt, is fear of the enormous resources of the people of the United States, and the willingness the people have revealed, as the Listok affirms, to use them for forcible expansion of trade and territory. The statesmen of Europe do not exactly know what course America will pursue in her new greatness, and besides recognizing clearly that she is stronger than any single State on the Continent, they doubt in their hearts whether if all who speak English stood together, it would be possible for any coalition, even if it covered all the other civilized states, to raise up sufficient obstacles to American designs. They can not conceive that such a mass of power can be used for any but selfish ends. Therefore they are genuinely alarmed. The Listok actually speaks of a combination on the Continent to resist them. In China alone the professional diplomatists of the Continent hate the representatives of the Union, and would take any opportunity of giving them a sharp set down. They detest the American habit of using amateurs as ambassadors and ministers, men who use non-professional phraseology, and who never know how to distinguish between feint and earnest, and press any demands with a sort of conviction that they must in the end be granted. The frankness of the American agents strikes the old aristocrats of the European chancelleries as boorishness, their lawyer-like arguments as pettifogging, and their cool persistence as distinctly overbearing.”

The Spectator concludes that the Listok article, which passed the censor, was written by some diplomat, and draws American attention to it, maintaining that the Listok voices particularly and truthfully the “dislike and suspicion against America, which are now nearly universal among the Continental governments.”