GENERAL TER GOUKASSOFF.
Relieved the beleaguered Russian garrison at Bayazid during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877, captured the fortress; and otherwise distinguished himself during the war.
The other Armenian General who distinguished himself during the Russo-Turkish war was General Lazaroff.
That the Armenians should be constantly appealing to the Power that had pledged itself for their protection, and that the same Power should be constantly rallying the others, and making Ambassadorial demonstrations, was enough to rouse the vilest passions of a nature in which no feelings except vile passions existed.
Of all sins in this world, perhaps the sin of foolishness receives the severest punishment, and of all crimes, the crime of failure meets with the heaviest doom. For their foolishness in trusting in European protection and hoping for European intervention the unfortunate Armenians paid with rivers of their own blood, and for their crime of failure they were made to wallow in that blood. The darkest pages of their history have been written in the closing years of the nineteenth, and the early years of the twentieth century; never since the loss of their independence, nine centuries ago, had they hoped for so much, and never had they paid so dearly for their folly.
If they had carefully laid to heart the whole history of Europe’s intercourse with Asia, beginning with the conquests of the Macedonian Alexander, they would have read in the light of sober judgement, self-interest, and self-interest only written on every line and page, but they committed the folly of hoping that for their sakes the history of the world, which means in other words the history of human selfishness, was going to be reversed; and they forgot what was more important than all, that Europe had nothing to gain by their emancipation. There is only one explanation for their folly. It is a peculiarity of human nature that the troubles we have been bearing with more or less patience, become unbearable when once hopes of deliverance from them are awakened. Article 61 of the Treaty of Berlin awakened hopes that proved bitterer in the eating than Dead Sea fruit. It aroused towards the Armenians the diabolical animosity of the human fiend who held sovereignty over them.
Hunted like wild beasts, killed like rats and flies, out of the depths of its agony and its martyrdom, the nation has still contrived to rear its head and live; for it was as it is now, the industrious, energetic, self-respecting element in the Turkish Empire, with a virile life in its loins and sinews, that centuries of oppression culminating in the unspeakable horrors of a thirty years’ martyrdom has failed to exterminate.
As for the Treaty of Berlin—It has done its work.