Armenia and Her People; or, The Story of Armenia by an Armenian

by George H. Filian

THIRD CAUSE.

The Mohammedan population in Turkey is decreasing, and the Christians are increasing. When the present Sultan captured the throne from his brother Murad, Turkey had 40,000,000 people; as soon as he girded the sword of Osman, he began the great battle with Russia, and after the Turko-Russian war he found himself with 18,000,000. Who are the lost? Roumania, Bulgaria, Servia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Herzegovina, a part of Macedonia, Cyprus, and a part of Armenia. Practically the whole of Europe was lost for Turkey except Constantinople and the district Edirne or Adrianople. Turkey is not an empire any more, but it is a little kingdom; rather a little feudal system, or more accurately still, a little anarchy. If it were not for mutual European jealousy, the Sultan could not keep his anarchism. Yet many still think that the Ottoman Empire is a great one, a powerful government. They look at the Sultan and his dominion through a magnifying glass. This shows ignorance. The Turks are decayed and are decaying. The sick man of Turkey is the dead man of Turkey, and ought to be buried, but the European powers do not bury him because there are precious stones and jewelry in the coffin; no matter how bad the corpse smells, they will endure it. And the bad smell of the Sultan is killing hundreds of thousands of Christians; but the dead stays where it is, and may stay for some years, but the end will come before many have gone by. When I say that the days of the Sultan are numbered, and the brutal Turkish mis-rule will cease, many Americans will rejoin “that the same has often been said long years since, though the empire remains to-day, and seems likely to remain.” The fact is, however, that during my own life more than half of it has gone to pieces, and the fragment which remains will go to pieces soon. Permit me to say that all former prophecies have been mistaken because those who made them have judged and misjudged the situation from an occidental standpoint; I judge it from that of a native, who knows the realities as only a native can. What can an English ambassador or an American minister in Constantinople, staying perhaps two or three years, and entertained and decorated by the crafty Sultan, know about the internal state of Turkey? Having traveled through the country, lived and preached for years at a time; preached in different cities, including Constantinople, I can see signs of a break-up that a foreigner would not notice.

The reason the Turkish population does not increase is this: The army has to be made up of Mohammedans, partly because the Sultan does not put arms into the hands of the Christians, for obvious reasons, since they have no motive to uphold and every motive to fight him, and partly because to be a soldier in Turkey is a holy service, the privilege of Mohammedans alone. As there is a large standing army, nearly all the Mohammedan youths have to become soldiers. Their service begins when they are about twenty years old. The shortest term is five years; for many it is ten; and even after that, there are many who cannot escape. If a young Mohammedan is not married at twenty, obviously he cannot marry until twenty-five anyway, and perhaps thirty,—very late for a country population; if he is married his wife is virtually a widow for five to ten years. Now the reader can see my drift. With marriages so late, and husbands so long absent, Turkish families are small; they do not make good the deaths. And there is a still plainer cause: The soldiers being very poorly fed, and constant fighting going on, ninety per cent. die in the army, and so never have any families; the flower of the nation perishes barren. Those who survive and return are pale and sick, good for nothing, a burden to their families and to the nation. The Armenians have to support the Sultan’s army, since they do not furnish it, but they rear families, and are drowning out the Turks.

Another cause of decrease is the pilgrimage to Mecca, where Mohammed was born. On an average, a million pilgrims go there every year,—of course not all from Turkey, but most of them, and every year about 50,000 of them die of cholera before reaching home, from the Holy Well (Zemzem sooyi), which is full of unholy foulness; even those who live and return home take that water to their families, and many of the latter die too. Cholera is perpetual in Turkey, and it originates at Mecca. When I was in Marsovan twelve at one time went on the pilgrimage and only four returned. It is a great virtue to die where Mohammed was born, or to drink that water and die, and they are going to him at a rapid rate. Last year, when the English, Russian, and French consuls at Jiddeh, the seaport of Mecca, established a quarantine to detain those coming from Mecca and bringing cholera, they were murdered by the Mohammedan Arabs, who said they were interfering with the sacred religion, and the Sultan had to pay the indemnity.

Still another reason is the shocking increase of abortions among the wealthy town dwellers. The Mohammedan women are growing to love selfish indulgences better than the duties and delights of motherhood. They do not wish to be “bothered” by children, and they take medicine to prevent having them. Where the women come to this, it is better for a race to die out; they have outlived their purpose.

A fourth cause is polygamy. People naturally think that marrying more than one wife should increase the number of children; but the facts emphatically prove the reverse. The polygamous Turks do not increase as fast as the Christians who have but one wife.

For the fifth, the Turks are an exceedingly sensual race, by nature and education, as I have shown. The very religion that should help to make them pure, helps to make them vile. Lust leads them, and they follow; nature prompts, and their religion requires it. I am truly ashamed to tell it, but even when they go to their mosques to worship, they manifest their sensuality. Not only the relations of male and female are very rank, but between male and male they are worse; between the old Turks and young Turks, the very boys, the relations are too disgusting to describe. All such moral corruptions not only weaken a people’s forces morally, but physically as well; they substitute barren lusts for legitimate gratifications, selfish passions for mutual ones.

Hence the Mohammedans are fast decreasing in Turkey, and the Sultan is terrified, and hopes by killing a large part of the Christians, and forcing the survivors to accept Mohammedanism, that their power of multiplication may be the boon of a Mohammedan people. Out of the 18,000,000 inhabitants of Turkey, 6,000,000 are native Christians, about half of them Armenians. This leaves only 12,000,000 for the whole Mohammedan population in the present Turkish dominion; and it grows less, while the Christian part grows greater. To check this increase, the Sultan a few years ago made the obtaining of a marriage certificate compulsory, and the Turkish authorities have understood that they are to make it as hard as possible to get; it has cost great sums of money to obtain it. But for many months now, there have been no marriages at all in Armenia; the authorities will not grant certificates on any terms, and to prevent any more Christians being born, the daughters and young brides of the murdered thousands are made mothers through violation by the Turks and Kurds.

The Christians have been increasing not only from within, but from without. Europeans have begun to go wherever railroads go. Hence another reason for massacre and forced conversion. That the Sultan has been planning this massacre ever since the Turko-Russian war is evidenced by the fact that after the war he encouraged or ordered a number of Mohammedan tribes—Circassians, Georgians, Kurds, and Lazes—to emigrate from Russia to Armenia, confiscated masses of Christians’ property, and gave it to them, and directed them to reduce the number of Armenian Christians by any way they saw fit, giving them full license to do what they would with Armenians, without penalty. You know what that means with fierce tribes of human wild animals, cruel and foul, and he knew what it meant too, and intended it to mean that. Before his time the Christians far outnumbered the Mohammedans in Armenia proper; but under his “government”—his deliberate policy of extermination—great numbers fled the country, numbers were killed and their women made concubines to Mohammedans, and now the Mohammedans are more numerous in Armenia than the Armenian Christians. And if the Sultan is permitted to go on, he will kill a million more, the rest will be “converted,” and then he will call the attention of the European powers to this fact, and say, “See here, you ask me to reform Armenia; Armenia is reformed. There is no Armenia; there are no Armenians; the people in that part of my empire are Mohammedans, and they are satisfied with my government. What do you want from me? What right have you to interfere with my country and religion?” That is his plan. When the Berlin Congress was held, the Armenians were the majority in their own country, and the Congress decided on reforms for it; the Sultan promised them, with the full intention of depopulating and converting it, and then telling the powers there was no need of reform there. He is doing this now incessantly, and as remorselessly as a fiend.