In this growing unity of mankind it has come about that the Sultan of
Turkey cannot permit the massacre of Armenian Christians without
answering for such permission before the world.

It has come about that no viceroy, serving a woman, who is the guardian
of a boy, can be permitted to starve at his pleasure two hundred
thousand of God's children. The world is so closely united--that is to
say, unity is so real--that when such a viceroy does undertake to commit
such an iniquity, somebody shall hold his hands.

The story of Philip Nolan was published in such a crisis that it met the
public eye and interest. It met the taste of the patriotic public at the
moment. It was copied everywhere without the slightest deference to
copyright. It was, by the way, printed much more extensively in England
than it was in America. Immediately there began to appear a series of
speculations based on what you would have said was an unimportant error
of mine. My hero is a purely imaginary character. The critics are right
in saying that not only there never was such a man, but there never
could have been such a man. But he had to have a name. And the choice of
a name in a novel is a matter of essential importance, as it proved to
be here.

Now I had a hero who was a young man in 1807. He knew nothing at that
time but the valley of the Mississippi River. "He had been educated on a
plantation where the finest company was a Spanish officer, or a French
merchant from Orleans." He must therefore have a name familiar to
Western people at that time. Well, I remembered that in the preposterous
memoirs of General James Wilkinson's, whenever he had a worse scrape
than usual to explain, he would say that the papers were lost when Mr.