Mr. Chauncey M. Depew having been invited to deliver an address in Detroit, Mich., in the interest of Armenia, not being able to attend, wrote a letter to Gen. Alger, the chairman of the meeting, from which we quote as follows:
“The air is full just now of wars and rumors of wars. The fighting blood of all the peoples of all civilized countries seems to be warmed to the battle point. But, while there is a great and dangerous excitement over a boundary line in Venezuela and a filibustering expedition in South Africa, the peoples of Europe and of the United States remain unmoved and undisturbed by the burnings, sackings, slaughter and every form of savage murder and lust perpetrated upon the Christians of Armenia simply because of their adherence to the faith of Christendom. I have seen congregations weep at the presentation of the tortures and massacres of Christian martyrs under Nero and Diocletian two thousand years ago. Where are the tears for Christian men tortured and killed, Christian women outraged and slain, Christian children tossed upon the bayonets of a savage soldiery yesterday, last week and last month, with the frightful assurance that they will continue to be slaughtered and outraged and tortured and tossed upon bayonets to-morrow, the day after and next month and for months to come?
“Much as I believe in peace and its blessings, much as I detest war and its horrors, much as I feel that great provocations and the most imminent dangers to the liberty or the existence of the territories or the safety of the citizens of the country will justify an appeal to the arbitrament of arms, nevertheless I do feel that by a concert of action of Christian nations, of which the United States should be one, such a presentation should be made to the Sultan and his advisers as would stop these horrors and save our Christian brethren.”
The case of Rev. Mr. Knapp, of Bitlis, who is to be sent to Constantinople for trial on the charge of sedition, will afford a splendid occasion for a naval display. Let the question be opened up whether these treaty obligations of the Porte mean anything outside the reach of a warship. How can we maintain our traditions as the friend of the oppressed and downtrodden of earth if we let the brutal fanatical Sultan riot still in plunder, lust and blood?
Did we care for the poor manacled negro undergoing the horrors of the Middle Passage? Did we have any interest in healing “the open sore of the world?” Did we once have spirit enough to demand of the Bey of Algiers the release of all Christian slaves, the abandonment of the piracy he had practiced for years, and compel him to forego the tribute exacted from all nations?
And have we no voice, no heart, no sympathy, no power to demand that the Sultan shall stop his awful carnage of blood and prove before the bar of all Christendom by what right he any longer shall reign?
We can do this because the Eastern Question does not exist for us. Higher questions of humanity demand the first consideration. We can interfere in defence of the lives and property of Christians in Turkey without violating the Monroe Doctrine and would merit the gratitude of Europe and the world, if the final decision should be that the Sultan had forfeited by the slaughter of one hundred thousand men, women and children with the fiendish accompaniments of outrage, violation, torture, all right to be treated as anything else than an enemy of humanity, and a wild beast to be caged and gazed upon with execration and horror.
Are not the lives and happiness of a half million Armenians left homeless and penniless and who still tremble with fear and terror at the sight of their relentless foes of more consequence than the boundary line of Venezuela? And yet for the location of an imaginary line the President’s message came perilously near being a threat of war.
Had the President written as strong a message as that to the Sultan in November or December, 1895, and sent it with an escort of three battleships under the Stars and Stripes (stars for heroes, stripes for tyrants) demanding that the massacres cease at once or Yildiz Palace would be bombarded, the telegraph wires might have melted under the hot haste with which every Governor had been ordered to call off the hounds of hell from their battening on human blood. (I beg pardon of the hounds, hyenas, tigers and all other wild beasts for using their names in simile or metaphor to describe the swiftness, eagerness or ferocity of Kurd or Turk. It is only the poverty of language that makes such use allowable.)
But there is another thing we can do and England has shown us how to do it, scores of times, if not hundreds of times, in her own history. The American Board has suffered the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars in the destruction of missionary property; American citizens have suffered great money losses and their work has been broken up in many quarters; many churches in all parts of Anatolia, built wholly or in part with contributions from America, have been laid in ruins; they have gone down in ashes and pillage under the trampling hordes of Islam; the cost of relief has been enormous and the extra cost to all the missionaries has been very great, to say nothing of all the indignities to which they have been subjected (and in British estimation outrage upon the dignity of an Englishman is placed at very high figures.) Now let these damages be tabulated at full value and the bill presented to the Sublime Porte payable on demand and let us land a few marines at Stamboul and open out a few port holes upon the Palace and wake Mr. Sultan to the fact that it is quite as serious an affair to pluck the feathers of the American eagle as it is to twist the tail of the British lion.