the saint, if they could have foreseen what England and France would do eight hundred years later when such a crisis arrived! While the Sultan in the name of the Prophet was appealing to all the passions of a mad fanaticism to arise and "drive out the foreign infidels who were assailing their holy faith"-- there was in England an enthusiasm for his defense as splendid as if the cause were a righteous one.
It is not a simple thing to carry a bark deeply loaded with treasure safely through swift and tortuous currents.

England was loaded to the water's edge with treasure.

Her hope was in that sunken wreck of an empire which fate had moored at the gateway leading to her Eastern dominions, and what she most feared in this world was its removal.

As a matter of state policy, she may have followed the only course which was open to her; but viewed from a loftier standpoint, it was a compromise with unrighteousness when she joined Hands with the "Great Assassin" and poured out the blood of her sons to keep him unharmed.

For fifty years that compromise has embarrassed her policy, and still continues to soil her fair name.