In 1890, when the writer was at Constantinople, he was favoured with an interview by the Sultan, who spoke on the subject of the Armenians, and sent a message to Mr. Gladstone, conveying his most positive assurances that he was animated by none but the most friendly feelings towards these people, and that he was determined to secure to them good government. Such assurances from this quarter were but proofs of malevolent intentions. Certain it is that the tale of official massacres was thenceforth for some years a continuous one. Abdul Hamid appears to have deliberately made up his mind, if not to settle the Armenian question by extermination of the Armenians, once for all, at least to inflict such a lesson on them as would never be forgotten. This policy culminated in 1894. Commissioners were then sent into the country inhabited by Armenians with directions to summon the Moslems of the district to the mosques and to inform them of the Sultan’s wishes and plans. They were to be told that liberty was given to them to take by force the goods of their Armenian neighbours, and if there was any resistance to kill them. It was not an appeal to the fanaticism of the Moslems, but rather to their greed for loot and to their jealousy of their more prosperous neighbours.

At the same time every precaution was taken to prevent the news of these wholesale acts of rapine and massacre from being known to the outside world. No strangers or visitors were allowed to enter the country where these scenes were taking place, and the most rigorous censorship was applied to all letters coming from them. Save in a few rare cases where the mollahs refused to obey, in the belief that the Koran did not justify such acts, the instructions were acted on and the policy of murder and robbery was preached in the mosques. In the province of Bitlis twenty-four Armenian villages were destroyed by Zeki Pasha. Their inhabitants were butchered. Zeki was decorated by the Sultan for this infamy. In 1895, and again in 1896, wholesale massacres of Armenians took place, organized by Sultan Abdul Hamid, and effected through the agency of Shakir Pasha and other officials, civil and military. It was estimated that a hundred thousand Armenians were victims of these massacres, either directly or indirectly by starvation and disease which followed them. Constantinople itself, on August 22 and 28, 1896, was the scene of an organized attack on the Armenian quarter. It was invaded by gangs of men armed with clubs, who bludgeoned every Armenian to be found there. In vain did the ambassadors protest and appeal to the treaty of Berlin. In vain did Mr. Gladstone issue, for the last time, from his retirement and appeal to public opinion on behalf of these people, designating the Sultan as Abdul the Great Assassin. No Power was willing to use force or even to threaten force on behalf of the Armenians. Even Russia was disinclined to do so. These people had no wish to be absorbed by Russia. An Armenian of good position and wide acquaintance with his countrymen in Asia Minor, when questioned by the writer on this point in 1890, said that the Armenians had no desire to become subjects of Russia. They would prefer to remain under the Turks, if England would hold a big stick over the Sultan; but if England would not do this, they would prefer Russia, or the devil himself, to the Turk.

It need not be said that those massacres of 1890-5 have been completely put into the shade by the far more extensive and bloody massacres of 1915, and that the policy of deporting the whole population of Armenians has been carried to a terrible conclusion.

There remains the case of the Macedonians and other people of the Balkans who were replaced by the treaty of Berlin under Ottoman rule. The difficulty of dealing with them was aggravated by the fact that the population of these districts was not homogeneous. Bulgarians, Greeks, and Serbians were in many districts mixed up, each with separate villages or communities, so that no definite geographical lines could be drawn between them. The neighbouring States of Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece were furiously jealous of one another, each claiming these intervening districts. This, however, was no excuse to the Porte for the continued misgovernment of these provinces. Their unfortunate populations, while enduring the evils of misrule, were able to compare their position under Turkish rule with that of their more fortunate neighbours who had been liberated from it by the treaty of Berlin, and were enjoying all the benefits of self-government in Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece.

The writer had the opportunity of personally forming an opinion on this subject. In 1887 and 1890 he paid visits to Greece, and in 1890 he visited Bulgaria on his way to Constantinople, staying a few days at Sofia and Philippopolis. In both cases he was able to compare the new condition of things with what he recollected of his previous visits to these districts in 1857. Nothing could be more striking and more satisfactory to those who had felt confidence in the principle of self-government and of democratic institutions. The change in Bulgaria was the more remarkable as it had been effected in the twelve years which had elapsed since the treaty of Berlin. In these few years the Bulgarians had equipped themselves with the machinery of a progressive democratic community, with schools and colleges, and with compulsory education. Roads, harbours, and improvements of all kinds were in course of construction. The Tartars and Circassians who had been planted in Bulgaria by the Porte after the conquests by Russia of the Crimea and the Caucasus, and who were the main instruments of the horrors of Batak, had again been transplanted by the Porte in Asia Minor. But the indigenous Moslems, whether of Slav or Turkish race, in spite of vehement exhortations of their mollahs, remained and were well treated by the Christian population now in possession of power. They had no cause for complaint. They were represented in the National Assembly of Bulgaria by not a few men of their own religion.

The Bulgarian peasants, who, under Turkish rule, had in many parts been driven from the fertile plains into the Rhodope Mountains and had there formed congested districts, had migrated again into the plains and were extending cultivation. A member of the Bulgarian Chamber of Deputies, when asked by the writer what his constituency of peasants thought of the change since old Turkish times, replied that they all admitted that though taxation had not been reduced there was this great difference: Under the Turkish régime the taxes went into the pockets of the Turkish officials and of the Sultan’s gang of robbers at Constantinople, and the peasants who paid got no return for them. But under the new régime they had full return for their money in schools and roads, with other improvements, and in the protection of life and property. Brigandage, which used to be rampant, had wholly ceased, and justice could be obtained from the magistrates without bribes.

In Greece there was everywhere the same story, the same comparison of the present with the past, to the immense advantage of the existing state of things. Brigandage had entirely ceased. Athens had become a capital worthy of the nation—remarkable for the number and character of its public buildings and institutions, for its museums, colleges, and schools, founded for the most part by wealthy Greeks in all parts of the world.

There remains to consider what had been the relative and contemporaneous changes in the Balkan provinces still remaining under Turkish rule and in the (mainly Moslem) countries of Asia Minor, Syria, and Mesopotamia. To inquiries of the writer in all quarters, in 1890, there was but one answer, that since the treaty of Berlin the condition both of Christians and Moslems throughout the Turkish Empire had gone from bad to worse. In the Christian Balkan provinces still under Turkish rule misgovernment was more rampant. Brigandage had increased. The rapacity and exactions of the Turkish officials were worse than ever. Discontent was seething in all directions—the more so when the populations compared their fate with that of their more fortunate neighbours across the frontiers who had been liberated by the armies of Russia and by the treaty of Berlin. Nor were the reports as to the condition of the Moslem subjects of the Porte in any way better. The exactions of Turkish officials had increased on people of all races and religion. The concurrent testimony from all quarters was that the condition of the Moslem peasants had greatly deteriorated.

The writer, on his return from the East in 1890, in the following paragraph described the danger to Turkey resulting from this state of things:—

The danger to Turkey in its Eastern provinces of Asia Minor and in its European provinces in Macedonia and Epirus is the comparison between the condition of those who were freed in 1878 from the Sultan’s rule, and who have become self-governing, as in the case of the Bulgarians, or have gone under the rule of Austria, Russia, or Greece, with those who remain the subjects of Turkish rule. When, on one side of mere geographical lines, without any physical difference, the populations are flourishing and improvements of all kinds in roads, railways, harbours, schools, etc., are being effected; when brigandage is at an end, and the cultivation of land is extending; when justice is equally administered, and security to life and property is afforded by the authorities; and when all these improvements date from the time when they ceased to be under Turkish rule; and when, on the other side of these lines, the conditions are the same as formerly, or even worse, and no improvement of any kind has taken place, the contrast must inevitably lead to fresh aspirations of the peasantry, to renewed political difficulties, to threats of intervention, and to further schemes for disintegrating the Empire at no distant date. The real defects of the Turkish Government appear to be the same as ever, not so much in the laws themselves as the administration of them, or the want of administration, the excessive centralization, the want of honest and capable governors, the corruption which infects all official classes, the want of money to supply the needs of the central Government and the extravagance of the Sultan, the consequent excessive taxation, the complete absence of security for life and property.[46]