There are about five millions of Armenians in the world at present:
three millions in the Turkish Empire, a million and a half in Russian
Armenia, and half a million more scattered through Persia, India,
and Burmah, Egypt, Europe (there are two or three hundred thousand
in the Austrian Empire), and America. There are poor and ignorant
people among them, as among every people; the majority, however, are
(or were before the late horrors) well off, and many of them rich,
educated, refined, and, in a word, modern Christian people. Of
all the impudent inversions of truth ever perpetrated, the most
outrageously impudent and shamelessly the exact contrary of fact is
the assertion of Mavroyeni Bey, the Turkish minister at Washington,
that the case of the Turks against the Armenians is like that of the
whites against the Indians in this country; that the American whites
must be allowed to keep the Indians down, and the Turks must be allowed
to keep the Armenians down. If the Indians possessed all the money,
all the intelligence, all the cultivation, and all the morals in
America, and the whites were a mob of ignorant, cruel, lustful ruffians
holding them down by the organized power of the sword, the comparison
would be just. As it is, the Turks correspond fairly enough with the
Indians, and the Armenians to the whites, in every other respect than
military power. Does a Turk--a true Turk--ever write a book? Does he
ever publish a newspaper, or read one? Does he ever build a church,
or pay attention to the moral precepts taught in one? Does he ever
found or manage a business, or even an estate? In a word, does he have
any more intellectual, moral, or business part in the life of modern
civilization than a Hottentot or a Matabele? And do not the Armenians
do and have all these things? Are they not in the stream of the same
kind of cultivated Christian life led by Americans? Nowhere else on
earth, but in the Turkish Empire, can one find millions of gentlemen
and ladies and civilized modern citizens ruled over, oppressed, and
massacred in hundreds of thousands by a gang of mediaeval Asiatic
barbarians, not advanced from the time of Timour or Jenghiz Khan. It
is the greatest anachronism and monstrosity of modern times.
If my work is thought prejudiced, listen to what is said of them by
men of the first authority,--the greatest statesmen, the best informed
special correspondent, and one of the chief historians of England at
the present time. First the statesman:--
"The Armenians are the representatives of one of the oldest
civilized Christian races, and beyond all doubt one of the
most pacific, one of the most industrious, and one of the most
intelligent races in the world."--[Gladstone.