There are three kingdoms which are chiefly concerned in this Eastern question:—Turkey, England and Russia; and while they are debating and manœuvring, poor Armenia is being ground between the upper and nether millstones of their mutual jealousies and ambitions and the coming of the Kingdom of Righteousness is delayed.
These three nations have stood facing each other for more than a century. Russia on the one side resisting the invasions, conquests and atrocities of the Turk, England on the other his right hand of strength in time of pressure. Throughout the entire history of the Tartar invasions with all their bloody victories and cruel conquests you see Russia rising again and again across his path like a stone wall. But England, in spite of all professions to the contrary and in spite of the earnest and solemn protests of her people against the atrocities of the Sultan’s reign—and never more hot or indignant words have been uttered throughout England than during the last few months—England has always stepped in just in time to save the Empire from destruction and prolong its barbarous rule.
Is it not written large on the page of history that in 1798, when Napoleon invaded Egypt, England came to the rescue and fought France to save the Turk? In 1853, it joined France and fought Russia, when the Czar attempted to protect the Greek Christians in Turkey: and by the treaty of Paris restored to the Sultan the command of the Lower Danube, shut out the Czar from his protectorate over the Danubian provinces and closed the Black Sea against all ships of war. Worst of all the treaty adopted the Porte into the family of European nations. Mr. James Boyce, in a Century article on the Armenian question, says: “The other nations of Europe now treat the Turks as if they were a civilized state and even talk of respecting their susceptibilities.” But they have no title to be so treated and ought never to have been admitted into the rank of civilized nations. Mr. Freeman describes them as “merely a band of robbers encamped in a country whose inhabitants they despoil.” And the passionate words of Edmund Burke are quoted as he exclaimed, “What have these worse than savages to do with the Powers of Europe but to spread destruction and pestilence among them. The ministers and the policy which shall give these people any weight in Europe will deserve all the bans and curses of posterity.”
Brave and noble words, but this is just what England forced on Russia and Europe by the treaty of Paris. And again at the close of the Russo-Turkish war, when the Porte was pleading for life and had gladly accepted the San Stefano treaty, the wily Beaconsfield and the present Premier stepped in and, by the Berlin treaty, handed back to the tender mercies of the Turk more than forty thousand square miles of territory and three million Bulgarian Christians. But what do we see in 1895? England afraid in the critical moment to send her despatch boat through the Dardanelles to insist that the promised reforms in Armenia should be executed and that the massacres of Christians should be stopped. Yet for this purpose had she secured the cession of the island of Cyprus.
By declining at the last moment to give her consent to the forcing of the Dardanelles, Russia most shrewdly outwitted England and humiliated her before the world. England lost her prestige and the glory of her power was tarnished when she failed, through fear of Russia, to execute what before the world she had pledged herself to do.
We are not called upon to defend Russia’s internal policy—her argus-eyed espionage, the cruelties attending the exiling of criminals to Siberia and deporting many suspects without even a form of trial. But when Russia is called semi-civilized, or half-barbarous, and is scarcely allowed to rank among the Christian nations of Europe—we merely remark that she has no opium war laid to her charge, she never blew mutinous sepoys from the mouths of shotted guns. She has never taken possession of any Turkish territory under pretext of reforming the internal administration of the Sublime Porte. If now, by shrewd diplomacy, the Czar rules at Constantinople, while the Sultan reigns but is in reality only his vassal, there is a decided checkmate on the political chessboard of European politics since the last move at Berlin.
If it be true then the Bosphorus is free to Russia, and the Czar is at liberty to march Russian troops at any time into Armenia. Indeed the rumor was that the excessive massacres ceased immediately when the Czar said “enough.”
England was brought into this humiliating situation by her own hesitation to do the right when all Europe except Russia was a unit with her in insisting that the Sultan must be brought to terms even if they should be obliged to force the Dardanelles.
Armenian Refugees at the Labor Bureau at Van.