If the Turk were a fanatical persecutor of all persons professing another faith than his own, how is it that for centuries Jews, Roman Catholic and Greek Christians have been allowed free exercise of their religion in all parts of the Turkish Empire, and that Protestant missionaries of many sects have not been interfered with in that country? Does not all this tend to prove that the Armenian trouble is a political and not a religious one?
Mr. Sidney Whitman further says, that in one hospital he visited he found that about forty Turkish soldiers, who were lying there, were wounded by Armenian bombs or revolver shots during the street fighting, and that the correspondents of the different European papers, when asked to inspect a large quantity of bombs found in a house at Pera, refused to do so.
Such was the general disinclination to admit any fact which could tell in favour of the great provocation the Turks had received from the Armenian revolutionists.
The sad case of the late Mr. Melton Prior shows a pleasing exception to the general attitude adopted by the foreign journalists:
The renowned war correspondent confided to me that he was in an awkward predicament. The public at home had heard of nameless atrocities, and was anxious to receive pictorial representations of these. The difficulty was how to supply them with what they wanted, as the dead Armenians had been buried and no women or children suffered hurt, and no Armenian church had been desecrated. As an old admirer of the Turks, and as an honest man, he declined to invent what he had not witnessed. But others were not equally scrupulous. I subsequently saw an Italian illustrated paper containing harrowing pictures of women and children being massacred in a church.
VI.
And now within the last two months we find once more the same influences at work, and many of the same men who promulgated the Bulgarian atrocities exploiting fresh massacres of Armenians. There is absolutely no reason why we should implicitly believe the reports which have been so assiduously circulated in the Press and on the platform, simply because, owing to the unfortunate war with Turkey, we are unable to ascertain what has really happened. The exploiters of these stories are under the same disability, having only heard one side, and that an extremely biassed one. The value of certain newspaper information is curiously illustrated by Sir Edwin Pears who, writing about the Bulgarian “atrocities,” says, “I collected a number of rumours (sic!) and made much use of the information which Dr. Long furnished me ... [my account] appeared in the Daily News, on the 23rd (June 1876).” Dr. Long, according to Sir Edwin, was a former missionary and correspondent to “an obscure newspaper in America,” and relied for his information entirely upon Bulgarian letters and not on personal investigation. No Englishman worthy of the name would condemn a prisoner on the evidence of the prosecution alone, without first hearing the evidence for the defence. Yet that is exactly what we are now asked to do. The Editor of the Economist is right when he says “Certainly we must not allow our standards of proof to decline in judging reports of atrocities,” and this is especially necessary at a time when truth seems rarer than fiction, and when sensational stories are passed as authentic reports for the acceptance of a public prone to believe anything (witness the stories, all since proved to be entirely fictitious, of the fatal accident, the suicide, and finally the burial of the German Crown Prince).
Captain Granville Fortescue, the well-known American war correspondent, in his recently published book, “What of the Dardanelles,” gives an example of how stories—not to call them by another name—are manufactured and disseminated by means of the Press all over the world: