This was an earnest, urgent, emphatic, even threatening appeal: but where was there any warrant for the last threat? There was no ultimatum ready. No nation was going to take up arms against Turkey, England least of all. There was no agreement among them to let England take up the task alone. If there had been, one battleship before Constantinople would have brought the massacres to a speedy close and could have compelled the punishment of the Governors in every vilayet where the horrors of Sassoun had been repeated with increased torment and misery. But the fact remains, and the fact is the thing emphasized, that England and all the Signatory Powers sat in masterly inactivity though with steam up at Salonica and let the deadly work go on. There is only time to notice one question, “Why did not Russia agree to the forcing the Dardanelles and coercing the Turks? The blame for the fiasco must fall upon Russia.”
How so? Could you reasonably expect Russia to assist England in performing her promises to protect Armenia when you remember the humiliation of the Berlin Treaty? If England entered into engagements she was powerless to make good, whose fault was that? And when the implicit appeal was to her Christian sympathy the Russians replied in their press: “Where were all these glorious virtues of Englishmen when Lord Beaconsfield handed back the Christian subjects of the Sultan to the dismal fate which has only now begun to excite their pity, when an improvement would suit their policy and further their designs? If England continued to be both humane and Christian while suppressing those noble impulses eighteen years ago, it is hard to understand why we can not remain both, while holding them in control to-day.”
To those who deny to Russia any disinterested motives of Christian sympathy in her war with Turkey to deliver Bulgaria from the horrible misrule of the Sultan, this refusal will furnish only another illustration of her being what they consider her, viz: a half-civilized nation.
But for England to look to a Power she considers her mortal enemy as regards the occupation of Constantinople, for help to rescue the Armenians from Kurd and Circassian and Turkish regulars, set upon them by the Porte, is the sublimity of political innocence, or the confession of utter weakness.
The Russian Bear smiled at the innocence, and with grim satisfaction, perhaps, allowed the Turk to wave back the fleets of the allied Powers from the straits of the Dardanelles and continue his fiendish massacres.
Weigh each for himself the responsibility of each of the Great Powers in any scales he may choose, distribute the guilt by a different judgment, and yet the failure of these Christian nations to unite for the deliverance of Christian Armenia from the barbarous and cruel, most lustful and brutal outrages under which they were suffering, will be stamped by history as the most awful crime against humanity upon which the sun ever gazed during all the passing years of the nineteenth century, and only to be paralleled by the apathy of Western Europe, when alone in 1453 Constantinople fought her last battle for the cross and fell under the sword and power of Islam.
CHAPTER XVIII.
AMERICA’S DUTY AND PRIVILEGE.
Our self-imposed task to voice as clearly and strongly as we could the History and Horrors of Armenia under the Curse of Islam is nearly finished. For many weeks the fires have burned hot within us, and the daily news from the land of sorrows has only made our heart beat more rapidly and our pen fly the faster that our appeal might reach your ears while yet there was time to save from utter destruction a remnant of this most ancient Christian people of whom two hundred thousand now look to England and America for daily bread.