The Czar’s Government increased its severity towards the Armenians, and when the Russian police made the existence of the secret societies at Tiflis too precarious, the Armenian revolutionaries moved their headquarters and branches to New York, Paris, London, and Geneva, where, between the years 1889 and 1892, they founded their secret societies the Hintchak, the Aptak and subsequently the most diabolical of them all, the Dashnahsutium. They also founded a regular revolutionary propaganda publishing their own papers and reviews.
These societies, by blackmailing and preying upon the rich Armenian financiers and traders of Europe and America, soon became wealthy corporations. Hunted out of Russia, they sent their emissaries into Kurdistan, where they renewed their nefarious campaign. Although denounced and hated by the respectable resident Armenians and the priests, whom they blackmailed and murdered as occasion offered, they even tried to embroil the central government with the European Powers by committing crimes, the responsibility for which they attempted by false evidence to fix on the Missionary Colleges. They committed murders in the streets of London. In New York the police unearthed a conspiracy of blackmail, bomb outrages and murder, which completely terrorized the rich Armenian bankers and merchants. A little over two years ago the London Press reported the discovery by the New York police of a further conspiracy of terrorism and assassination.
The advent of these revolutionary agents into Kurdistan had the inevitable result of embittering the former good relations of the Turkish Government and the resident Moslem population with the Christian, and especially the Orthodox Armenian section of the inhabitants.
This was natural for the reason that in Turkey the people have a horror of secret societies and plots, founded on the experience of their own suffering at the hands of the Greek Hetairia and the Bulgarian Komitadjis. The fears of the Turks and the Kurds were genuine. They believed that the members of the once loyal “millet-i-sadika” no longer merited that title, and that they were arming and preparing to massacre the Moslems. The whole country became like a powder magazine, and Europe had not long to wait for the inevitable spark which started what are known as the Armenian massacres of 1894 and 1896.
IV.
We shall better understand the question of these massacres, if we first study the Armenian character, at the same time noticing the aptitude and fitness of the race for self-government.
The Pro-Armenian societies in this country would have us believe that the native Armenians are as a race poor, gentle, honest, agricultural folk, persecuted by wicked officials, robbed of their hard-earned savings by the wild Kurds and cruel Circassians, and periodically martyred for their Christian faith; and to give vividness to this pleasant picture one or two europeanized, highly-veneered Armenians are usually produced on our public platforms as living specimens of this “harmless, inoffensive” people. In this manner Lord Bryce, speaking recently at Manchester, pictured the life of mingled simplicity and refinement lived by this Christian race in Moslem Turkey, and went on to say that the Armenians were amongst the most orderly subjects of the Turks, well educated and accustomed to the refinements of civilization as much as ourselves. If this were true it would imply that civilization, as we understand the word, must have made tremendous progress in Kurdistan within recent years under Turkish rule, but this Lord Bryce will probably not admit.
Lord Bryce proceeded to add that for the past sixteen centuries the Armenians had been a Christian people, clinging to their religion in spite of constant persecution, while all the time they might have secured complete immunity from such by renouncing their Christian faith.
It is fair to presume that Lord Bryce struck this anti-Moslem note in order to command sympathy by appealing to the religious prejudices of his audience, for the observation was not only inopportune but entirely unnecessary, in as much as later in the same speech he stated that “there was no fanaticism about the massacres and no outbreak of Moslem fury on the part of the people.”
How utterly false is his estimate of the character of the native Armenian will be shown by the testimony of competent and observant travellers and orientalists, who have studied this people in their own homes. Let us see first what Sir Charles Wilson, the great traveller and Orientalist, author of the article on Armenia in the Encyclopædia Britannica, says: