THE ARMENIAN MASSACRES AND THE TURKISH CONSTITUTION.
The Turkish Constitution came with a bound that shook the equanimity of Europe. To the anxious and jealously watching eyes of Europe the “sick man in her midst” was at last becoming moribund. His recovery was as startling as unexpected. Europe had not correctly gauged the latent forces within the Turkish Empire, neither had she correctly estimated the far-reaching astuteness of the tyrant on the throne.
Assailed by enemies from without and within, feeling the foundation of his throne crumbling, Abdul Hamid, arch murderer and assassin, performed his own auto da fé, and rose from his ashes a constitutional sovereign. The obduracy of the merciless tyrant melted like wax before the approach of personal danger, and the act was necessary to save himself.
Hopes rose high at such a magnificent coup d’état of the revolutionaries. Young Turks and Armenians fell on each other’s necks, embraced, and mingled their tears of joy together. Leaders of the Turkish Constitution proclaimed in public speeches that the Turks owed the deepest debt of gratitude to the Armenians who had been the initiators of their struggle for Freedom, and in the Armenian graveyard at Constantinople Turks held a memorial service and kissed the graves of the Armenian dead, whom they called “the martyrs whose blood had been shed for Turkish freedom.”
At the banquet given by Abdul Hamid to the Delegates of the Turkish Parliament, the Armenian Delegates alone refused to attend, declining to be the guest of the man responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of their countrymen.
The Armenian revolutionaries had stood behind the Young Turk party and joined hands with them; already the nation at large imagined itself breathing the air of Freedom, and already in anticipation drank in deep draughts of the air of Liberty.
The awakening came all too quickly. In spite of the Constitution the machinations of Abdul Hamid and his palace clique could find fruitful ground among a fanatical populace to whom the Padishah was not only the Lord’s anointed but the Lord’s appointed, the delegate of the Prophet on whom his sacred mantle had fallen; added to this the incentive of pecuniary rewards to a brutal soldiery and the lust of plunder, and once more the horrors of massacres were let loose on the Armenians. There followed sacked and burning villages, plundered and devastated homes, an unarmed population put to the sword, and as in every case, cruelties of the most hideous and ferocious nature perpetrated on women and children.
In the whole long story of the massacres, courage to face their oppressors has never been found wanting on the part of the Armenians. It is on record that the women of a whole mountain village surprised by Turkish soldiers, in the absence of the men, fought and resisted to the last gasp, and finally, to escape the clutches of the brutal soldiery, committed suicide with their children by precipitating themselves from their mountain cliffs. A nation which could produce such women, and which has had the simple courage to die for its faith, as no Christian people has died before, is not wanting in brave men, but no amount of bravery and heroism can save an unarmed population from being mowed down by soldiery equipped with modern instruments of carnage and slaughter.
The horrors of Adana coming on the heels of a Constitution they had aided, and from which they had hoped so much, presages grave fears for the Armenians.