The rumours of a revolution in Turkey have been so many and frequent, that I must state they have not the least foundation in fact. Why should the British public be fed on these silly canards? Time and again I have read long dispatches from Athens and Mytilene, which purport to describe the troubled conditions in Turkey. I remember an item that told of a riot in Constantinople. Reference was made to the looting of the Pera Palace Hotel by a “stop-the-war” mob. On the date mentioned in the dispatch I was in this hotel. The whole story was pure invention. Personal observation convinced me, that Constantinople was the most normal of all the capitals of the nations at war.
Sir William Osler, the eminent physician, in a speech recently delivered at the Leeds Luncheon Club, said that:
In a great crisis like the present we are all a bit surcharged emotionally. Judgment becomes difficult, and we become weak-minded and believe anything any Ananias says. Who could have dreamt that so early in the war there were so many liars in the country as the men and women who saw the Russian troops? An instability of this sort leaves us an easy prey for the Yellow Press. Think of all the legless, armless, eyeless Belgians that crowded their columns. All had been seen by these perverters; few, if any, by the camera. What a triumph of unstrung nerves was that matter of the war babies.
Russians, mutilated Belgians and “war-babies,” were said to be in our midst, and yet it took us weeks to learn the truth. We shall indeed be hysterical if we allow ourselves to be hoaxed about alleged events in the recesses of Asia Minor.
It is well to recall that Sir Henry Layard in the report of the Bulgarian atrocities, from which we have quoted, stated that: “there are persons, and amongst them I grieve to say Englishmen, who boast that they invented those stories with the object of writing down Turkey, to which they were impelled by a well-known hand.”
No one believes that gentlemen in the position of Lord Bryce, Mr. Noel Buxton, Mr. Aneurin Williams and Sir Edwin Pears would for a minute willingly deceive the British public; but it is indeed more than possible that some “well-known hand” has been deceiving them. May not this hand have been that of the wealthy Armenian Committees which are spread over Europe and America, and who have never hesitated as to the means chosen for the attainment of their objects, because with them the end justifies the means? Even the Earl of Crewe, when on October the 5th, 1915, he replied in the House of Lords to the Earl of Cromer’s question as to “whether His Majesty’s Government had received any information confirmatory of the statements made in the Press to the effect that renewed massacres of Armenians had taken place on a large scale,” based his information on a report he had received from His Majesty’s Consul at Batum, and which he acknowledged was founded upon the statements published in a newspaper at Tiflis. It is certainly most significant that the British Consul at Batum,—a town actually on the frontier—should have had to rely for his information on a newspaper published at Tiflis, nearly 200 miles further back. This newspaper was probably “The Horizon,” an Armenian propagandist organ, and therefore quite unreliable. Likewise, unless he had been wilfully misinformed, it would be difficult to account for Lord Bryce’s statement at the Mansion House, that there was not the slightest basis for the report that the Armenians had themselves provoked the massacre by rising in conspiracy. The facts and probabilities, so far as we know them, are otherwise.
The Turks had just sustained in the Caucasus a severe defeat. They needed every available man and every round of ammunition to check the advancing Russians. It is therefore incredible that without receiving any provocation they should have chosen that particularly inopportune moment to employ a large force of soldiers and gendarmes with artillery to stir up a hornet’s nest in their rear. Military considerations alone make the suggestion absurd.
The Germans had failed in their projected attack on Calais and Dunkirk after suffering enormous losses. The Franco-British forces were massing for the counter-stroke. Russia was almost at the gates of Cracow, Przemysl had fallen, and her armies were descending into the plains of Hungary. The Servians had retaken Belgrade after inflicting a disastrous defeat on the Austrians. The Allied fleets were hammering at the Dardanelles. Greece, Roumania and possibly Bulgaria might at any moment join the Entente Powers. The position of Turkey and the Central Powers appeared worse than it has ever been before or since. It is therefore most unlikely that the Turkish Government without receiving any provocation, and even if, as suggested by Lord Bryce, they entertained the idea of exterminating the Armenians, should have chosen so inopportune a moment to damn themselves and forfeit all hope of magnanimous treatment for their country if defeated, besides running the risk of prejudicing the Christian Balkan States against them. Lord Bryce’s accusation, from the point of view of political expediency, carries its own refutation.
In peace the Turks are a good-natured, easy-going race, hospitable, generous to the poor, and particularly fond of animals and children—a sure sign of a kindly and humane disposition, long-suffering, but when provoked, like all the near Eastern races both Moslem and Christian, exhibiting a fury out of all proportion to the insult according to our Western ideas. In war time the Turks are neither fanatical nor intolerant. They are indeed less so than any of the Western nations with all their supposed superiority.
When Greece was fighting Turkey, the Greeks of Constantinople, although Ottoman subjects, actually dared to fly the Greek flag over their houses, and after the death of their archbishop, which occurred at that same time, paraded his dead body, seated upon the episcopal throne, through the streets of Pera, escorted by their prelates and clergy, without being subjected to any molestation. Annually, too, the Host is borne in procession through the streets of the City of the Khalif. Contrast this extraordinary tolerance with present conditions in London, where German subjects are forbidden to pray in their own churches in the German tongue and where, only a few years ago, the British Government on the occasion of the Eucharistic Congress refused to allow the Host to be borne through the streets of Westminster.