SOURCES
1. Report of American Committee on Armenian Atrocities. New York, October, 1915.
The report contains thirty-five extracts from the testimony of eye-witnesses, covering the period April 27 to August 3, 1915, from all parts of Asia Minor. Twenty-five representative Americans (including Hon. Oscar S. Strauss, twice American Ambassador to Turkey, Cardinal James Gibbons, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and former President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard University), signed this report, which states that each bit of testimony has been subjected to careful and extensive investigation, and that “the sources are unquestioned as to the veracity, integrity, and authority of the writers.”
2. Official report of the Parliamentary Debate in the House of Lords, on Wednesday, October 6, 1915. London, Parliamentary Debates, H. of L., volume xix., 67.
Interpellation of the Earl of Cromer, speech of Viscount Bryce, and comments of the Marquess of Crewe.
3. Lord Bryce’s revision and enlargement of the official report of his speech, as given in “Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation,” by Arnold J. Toynbee. London, November, 1915.
4. German missionaries’ letters to the Sonnenaufgang, published by Deutscher Hülfsbund für christliches Liebeswerk im Orient.
5. Narrative of Dikran Andreasian, translated by Rev. Stephen Trowbridge, and published in The Star of the East. London, November, 1915.
6. Testimony of eye-witnesses, published in the Boulogne-sur-Mer Telegramme, September 17; Paris Temps, September 15; Limoges Courrier du Centre, September 15; Tribune de Genève, September 4 and 24, October 14; Journal de Genève, October 13 and 24; Gazette de Lausanne, October 24; New York Evening Post, October 18. Résumés and editorial comments in Manchester Guardian, August 16 and October 26; London Times, October 8; Frankfurter Zeitung, October 9; Paris-Midi, October 17. All these dates, of course, are in 1915.
7. Circular letters of various dates from July 6 to October 22, 1915, sent out by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Boston, Mass., which are signed by James L. Barton.
8. A number of as yet unpublished personal letters. For obvious reasons, I cannot give the names of the writers, and the places from which they were written.
9. Personal conversations with persons of unimpeachable integrity and unquestioned authority, who have returned between September 15 and November 20 from Constantinople and Asia Minor. Their names must of necessity be withheld at this moment.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] I do not mean by this statement to deny that the educated Armenians, just as every other people under the yoke of another race, have not longed, in their most intimate sentiments, for the day when national aspirations would be realized. But, the Armenians are above all a practical people, and they did not look for what they knew was impossible of realization. In the correspondence concerning Armenian people in the Chancelleries of the Great Powers and in the archives of the Sublime Porte, the question has always been to obtain reforms that would secure for the Armenians only those privileges and only that measure of security and freedom, to which they had the right as Ottoman subjects to aspire. In 1913, the Powers, among whom was Germany, proposed to the Turkish Government a plan for reforms in Asia Minor, which was accepted and decreed by Turkey, but which was not put into execution. Up to the time of this terrible crime of the past few months, the Armenians demanded, and were glad to have obtained in Turkey, only those reforms that Turkey had agreed herself to put into effect.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.