A few days after this correspondence the fear of the Sultan seemed to have vanished, and he was brave enough to refuse permission to the Powers to send extra guardboats into the Bosphorus.
At this time it looked as if Sir Philip Currie, the British Ambassador, would act alone, and that he really meant to force the passage of the Dardanelles.
But the Sultan knew he would not dare to do it, and he knew also that the Powers were not agreed to use force. England proved herself impotent before the crafty diplomacy of the timid Sultan.
It is folly at this day to pretend to believe that the Sultan ever intended of his “spontaneous good-will” to protect the Armenians even as human beings from the cruelty of Kurd or Turkish officials.
The horrors of December and January give the lie direct to every promise made at Constantinople. The Sultan had outwitted England, if indeed England ever were in earnest, and by circulating a rumor of a Turco-Russian alliance, most effectually checked all danger of intervention by force—the only argument to which the Turk will ever yield—and proceeded to commit yet greater crimes if that were possible.
Under the very eyes of the Russian, English, and French delegates at Moush, the witnesses who had the courage to speak the truth to the representatives of the Powers were thrown into prison, and not a hand was raised to protect them: and within a stone’s throw of the foreign consuls and the missionaries, loyal Armenians were being hung up by the heels, the hair of their heads and beards plucked out one by one, their bodies branded with red-hot irons, and defiled in beastly ways, and their wives and daughters dishonored before their very eyes. And all that philanthropic England has to offer its protégés, for whose protection she holds Cyprus as a pledge, is eloquent sympathy.
She received Cyprus by secret convention, and now holds it as the price of innocent blood. The rewards of iniquity are in her hand. It was worse than folly; it was the refinement of cruelty to send a commission to investigate the outrages in Armenia, thereby irritating the Turk to the height of possible fury as his deeds were proclaimed to the world and then leave him free to wreak his compressed wrath upon the Christians for whose protection no hand would be uplifted. The Powers saw Armenia in misery, bleeding, dying, and passed by on the other side, saying, we are bound by the terms of the Berlin Treaty not to interfere with Turkey in the administration of her domestic affairs; we are sorry for you; we wish the Sultan would listen to our advice and not be quite so severe in his chastisement, but really you must have given him some cause for his anger.
Yes, such provocation as the lamb gave to the wolf that charged it with soiling the water, though it was drinking much farther down the stream.
The humiliation of England as one of the Great Powers was complete when in the House of Commons March 16th, in reply to questions that were put to him Mr. Curzon Under Secretary of Foreign Affairs was obliged to say that reports received by the Government confirmed the statements that a great number of forced conversions from Christianity to Islamism were still being made in Asia Minor. Under the circumstances of cruelty and systematic debauchery of defenceless Christian women through the devastated districts of Anatolia, he said, the British Consuls in Asia Minor had been instructed to report such cases, and representations in regard to them were constantly being made to the Government in Constantinople.
Representations were constantly being made! What did the Porte care for representations? How England was compelled to quaff the contempt even of the Turk who laughs or sneers as his mood may be over these representations of English Consuls and missionaries. The Sublime Porte—which means the Sultan—cabled the Turkish Legation at Washington to deny most emphatically the statements that appeared in the American religious press regarding forcible conversions to Islam.