THE meeting at the Mansion House on Monday to call for protection of Christian minorities in the Near East was much more fully reported in the Press than recent experience had led us to expect. The Daily Telegraph, which has consistently supported the cause of the Armenian people, devoted a whole column to it, and there were excellent summaries in the Times and the Morning Post. This is essentially a matter in which publicity is of the first importance. Only so long as the public is ignorant of the unparalleled cruelties of the Turkish Government during the war and of the recent massacres by the Kemalists can the British or French Governments, in pursuance of political ends, restore to the Turk power over Christian communities. Had the public understood the implications of the so-called Angora Treaty, there would have been a fierce outcry. The French Government, which, with the British, promised security and independence to Armenia, and had actually accepted a mandate for the administration of Cicilia, under which it was bound to protect the inhabitants, has now agreed to hand back to the Kemalists the very territory to which Christian survivors had been bidden to resort for safety. Are Christian people to remain dumb and inactive whilst their brethren in Asia Minor are exposed to the peril of utter extermination?

Sobriety on the increase

December 23rd, 1921.

SIR ARTHUR HOLBROOK, M.P., contributed to the Evening Standard on Tuesday some statistics relating to inebriety. They show unmistakably that sobriety is increasing in England, and Sir Arthur would like to inscribe that particular fact on a Christmas card and send it with the compliments of the season to all misguided people who have been misleading London magistrates lately. The figures for Greater London for the year ending October 16 show twenty-one thousand convictions for drunkenness, as compared with twenty-five thousand in a corresponding period last year and with nearly fifty thousand in 1913. The ratio of improvement is much the same in other large towns, the only exception being Carlisle, which, as our readers know, is the one town in the kingdom under State supervision. It was selected for an experiment in so-called temperance methods, and the result would seem to be that it has the distinction of increased drunkenness.