Mr. Sidney Whitman was in Constantinople at the time as special correspondent for the New York World in connection with the “so-called Armenian atrocities,” as he terms them. The instructions sent him by Mr. Gordon Bennett were very precise:
The correspondent is to take no sides and express no opinions of his own. In many cases it would appear that the matter sent to the papers by their correspondents in Turkey is biassed against the Turks. This implies an injustice, against which even a criminal on trial is protected.
Mr. Sidney Whitman’s book of “Turkish Memories” throws many interesting side-lights on these events. He says:
There was little or no reason for assuming that the disturbances had their source in religious fanaticism directed against the Christian as such; whilst evidence was accumulating that a vast Armenian conspiracy, nurtured in England, obscured the real issue, to which there were two sides.
Writing of the Press, he observes:
The agitation on the part of the Armenian Committees in the different capitals of Europe had been carried on to such purpose, that there was hardly an American or an English newspaper which had a good word left to say of the Turks. A horde of adventurers of various nationalities, déclassés of every sphere of life, cashiered officers among the rest, who had left their native country for its good, were eking out a precarious livelihood by providing newspaper correspondents, if not Embassies, with backstairs information.
He mentions that:
The agitation carried on in England by Canon McColl and the Duke of Westminster, backed by sundry fervent Nonconformists, had had the effect of exhibiting the fanatical Turk as thirsting for the blood of the Christian.
And yet not a single Christian other than the Orthodox Armenians was molested. With regard to the Jews he tells us how a Jewish money-changer, mistaken for an Armenian, had been set on by the mob: when it was ascertained that he was a Jew, he was released, but the crowd ran after him, and brought him back to collect his money, which was scattered on the ground. Would any other mob in the world have acted thus under similar conditions?
It is a noteworthy fact that from the time when the Jews first found shelter in Turkey from their Christian persecutors and the terrors of the Inquisition in Spain, until the present date, no one has ever even suggested that they have been ill-treated in the Ottoman Dominions; on the contrary, thousands of fugitive Jews, escaping from pogroms in Russia have within the last quarter of a century found security and peace in Turkey. Many Poles fleeing from persecution have found a safe asylum in Turkey, as well as the Hungarian leaders Kossuth, Gorgey and many others after their abortive revolution against Austrian domination. Although threatened with war by both Austria and Russia unless he surrendered the fugitives, the Sultan of Turkey refused to break the sacred laws of hospitality enjoined by Mohammed. On an earlier occasion a Sultan of Turkey had similarly refused to surrender to Russia the King of Ukraine (Lesser Russia), who was a refugee at his court, although he was offered a great reward should he comply, with war as the alternative in case of refusal.