The Sultan of Turkey, without doubt, has been the cause of much of the bloodshed and murder that have characterized some sections of that country in recent years. The number of those murdered in cold blood during the régime of the deposed Sultan numbers up into thousands, the exact number no one knows. It has now been learned that if the revolt against the new mode of government, which revolt he directly instigated, proved ineffectual, he had decided upon a slaughter of foreigners in Constantinople, expecting that foreign intervention would then be necessary, and that the blame of the insurrection could be put upon the Constitutionalists, making their further rule impossible. When this plot of the deposed Sultan was revealed to the leaders of the besieging army, it descended upon Constantinople the day before its schedule time. By how narrow a margin was the Constitutional movement successful! Now that the late Sultan is removed, it would seem that the greatest difficulty in the way of progress for Turkey is removed. Future events will demonstrate how fully this is true. For the sake of the Gospel missionary, we trust that Turkey will now have something like a reign of peace. The new Sultan of Turkey is inspiring considerable hope for the future welfare of Turkey. He seems to abound in moderation and manifests good judgment. A possibility of something like religious liberty dawning in that country now seems probable. After being girt with the imperial sword by the highest dignitary of the church and nation next to the Sultan,—the identical sword once wielded by Othman,—the new Sultan appeared before the people. The people shouted loyally and the soldiers fired a grand military salute. But significant of a new order of things, something never heard of before, outside of the Mohammedan priests surrounding the Sultan, as he stood in the square before the Mosque, were official representatives of the principal religions, other than Mohammedan, of the empire—the Greek patriarch, the chief Jewish Rabbi, and delegates from the Armenian, Bulgarian, and other churches. And then, above all the noise made by the soldiers and the people, rose a chorus sung by the schoolboys, the “Hymn of Liberty.” The strike in France called for the government postal and telegraph employees proved to be practically a failure. There was so little response that the strike was called off two days after being called. But it is evident that considerable bad feeling exists notwithstanding. In the provinces as well as in Paris there have been numerous cases of the cutting of telegraph wires and the destruction of letters in the boxes by pouring in destructive fluids. The battle-ship “Danton,” which was to be launched at Brest on May 22, was stuck on the ways, and there she remains, in great danger of a collapse of the supporting structure. There is grave suspicion that this is a case of intentional injury perpetrated by some of the workmen, many of whom are anarchists and have openly boasted that the battle-ship would never be launched. Various nations of the world have planned or in process of construction about seventy “Dreadnought” type of battle-ships. These will cost about ten million dollars each, and the whole number will cost in the aggregate the enormous sum of seven hundred million dollars. It would seem that with each year the limit of the war spirit had been reached, but not so, for as soon as one type has come to be recognized as the possible limit we find something else put forward that totally eclipses all previous efforts. Thus are the nations arming for the last great battle. The enormous preparations are really for that last awful struggle. No one of the naval Powers is planning it consciously that way, but so it will turn out.