The problem of Armenia and the Turkish atrocities there, is in the very
forefront of the world's burning questions at the present time. In
every civilized land it is ranked alongside their own pressing local
issues; everywhere there is not only sympathy and indignation, but a
feeling of real responsibility. We are a group of Christian nations,
and the first Christian nation is being exterminated. Within a few
months the unspeakable Turks and barbarous Kurds destroyed more than
a thousand villages and towns, murdered a hundred thousand Armenian
Christians,--men, women, and innocent children,--and left 500,000
others without homes, clothing, or food, thousands of women shamefully
defiled, and thousands of men put to horrible tortures. Dying in
the streets, in the fields, on the mountains; dying of hunger, of
cold, of storm, and of diseases bred of all these; dying of broken
hearts and despair, even more, of shame and mental torture. Yet all
these Armenians who thus suffered and were driven forth to starve
and die like deserted animals, were absolutely peaceable,--indeed,
they were totally unarmed and could not have been otherwise if they
wished,--perfectly respectable, most of them comfortably off, and
some of them rich. One who was last week a banker is to-day a beggar;
yesterday a merchant, to-day a tramp. Why? For the main reason that he
is a Christian, and the Sultan has resolved to have no more Christians
in his dominion; the doom of Islamism is hanging over their heads. "If
you accept Islam," they are told, "well and good; if you do not,
you shall be killed--or worse--as your fellows have been."
These are all facts, proved to superfluity, though the Sultan denies
them and instructs his ministers everywhere to deny them. How often
has the Turkish minister in Washington, Mavroyeni Beg, officially
(?) declared the Armenian atrocities to be fiction, giving the
papers lying statements (which come from the Sublime Porte), and
asserted that the Armenians were the aggressors! It is precisely
as though one should account for a devastated sheepfold, with the
wolves raging about in it, by alleging that the lambs had wantonly
assailed and slain the wolves first. Some pretended to believe this
rubbish; but most people, to their credit, are only the more angered
and disgusted by it. The Turkish proverbs, occasionally good, are
generally evil,--a significant index to the race; one of the commonest
is this: "Yalan yigitin kullesi dir" (A lie is the fortress of the
brave). Kill, plunder, ravish, and then deny it; not simply deny it,
but charge those very things to your enemy, and make them an excuse
for all you do to him or his. Such are the principles of the Sultan,
the false successor of the false prophet of Arabia. At the very time
when noble American and European Christians are sending help to the
survivors of his massacres, to the half-million homeless, naked,
starving, heart-broken beggars he has made from prosperous citizens,
he coolly denies that anything has happened but the putting down of
a few local riots. He writes to Queen Victoria sympathizing with her
expressions of humane sentiment, but declaring that the reports were
invented by evil-disposed persons; that on the exact contrary, it was
the Turks who were first attacked while praying in the mosques. He
assures the Queen that his measures have succeeded in restoring order.
And this same Sultan a few months ago, before the greatest of the
recent massacres, wrote to Lord Salisbury as follows:--"Take the words
of my honor, I will make reforms in Armenia. I will keep before me
every article of the desired reforms, and will order the governors
of the provinces to carry them into effect." He at once began to put
this pledge of his "honor" into effect, by sending orders from Yildiz
Kiosk to the provincial governors in Armenia to root out or convert
the accursed infidels. Since that promise of his "honor" months
have passed away; and during the time at least eighty thousand more
Armenian Christians have been killed, and even death has been the most
merciful "reform" he has bestowed on the land. The word in his mouth
means beggaring, burning, ravaging, violating, mutilating, torturing,
and assassinating. When all the leading Armenians are slain and their
helpless families forced to become Mohammedans, after the women have
been dishonored,--in a word, when all the Armenian Christians are
exterminated, then Armenia will have been reformed. A special chapter
is devoted to the person and doings of this eminent reformer.