The attitude of the Young Turks towards the Missionaries shows that
their “Nationalism” has made them not only criminal but insane. The
American Missionaries have worked in Turkey for more than eighty years.
Their aim has been to revive religion in the subject Christian peoples
and to give them an enlightened modern education; they have pursued
this aim disinterestedly with a striking measure of success, and they
have extended their work to the Moslems as far as the latter have
responded to their advances. They are the creators of practically all the
secondary education that exists in Turkey to-day. The most intelligent
and progressive elements in the population of the Empire have come
most under their influence, and have received from them a moral and
intellectual stimulus which they could never have found for themselves.
The educational work of the Missionaries should have been mentioned among
the attempts made during the 19th century to reform Turkey gradually
by a reconstruction within; for the effect of this work was far more
penetrating, and far more fraught with hope for the future, than most of
the political expedients instituted with diplomatic pomp and ceremony by
the Concert of the Powers. And the Missionaries were the best friends of
the Turkish government as well as of their subject peoples. They took no
part in their pupils’ politics; they had no ulterior political purpose of
their own to serve. They were the most valuable voluntary assistants the
Young Turks could have had in what should have been their foremost aims
if they had acted up to their democratic professions, and they were the
assistants whom they had least of all to fear.
Actually, however, the Young Turks, after they had destroyed the
Missionaries’ work by exterminating the subject peoples among whom it
was principally carried on, dragging away to exile, shame and death the
boys and girls in their schools, torturing to death the native professors
whom the Missionaries had trained up to be their colleagues, have
finally confiscated the American schools, colleges and mission-stations
in many parts of the Empire, and have put the harshest pressure on
the Missionaries themselves to quit the country of which they are the
benefactors.
On April 4th, 1916, the Turkish newspaper _Hilal_ published an article in
praise of a lecture by a member of the German Reichstag called Traub, in
which the lecturer is reported to have declared himself “opposed to all
missionary activities in the Turkish Empire.”
“The suppression,” writes _Hilal_, “of the schools founded and directed
by ecclesiastical missions, a measure which follows the abolition of
the capitulary régime, was no less important. Thanks to their schools,
foreigners were able to exercise great influence over the young men of
the country, and they were virtually in charge of the spiritual and
intellectual guidance of our country. By closing them the Government has
put an end to a situation as humiliating as it was dangerous....”
This is the policy of Ottomanisation. But it was put more bluntly by
a Turkish gendarme in conversation with a Danish Red Cross Sister,
who had been dismissed from her post in a hospital at Erzindjan for
protesting against the Armenian Deportations. “‘First,’ he said, ‘we kill
the Armenians, then the Greeks, then the Kurds,’ He would certainly,”
the Danish lady comments, “have been delighted to add: ‘And then the
foreigners.’”[2]