During a period extending over thirty years the civilized world has heard of Turkish Massacres of Armenians. Massacres of a nature so ferocious and diabolical, so hideous and revolting, that no pen could adequately describe their horrors.
Writing in 1896, Mr. James Bryce, in his supplementary chapter to the 4th edition of his book “Transcaucasia and Ararat” makes the following grave comment:—
“Twenty years is a short space in the life of a nation. But these twenty years have been filled with sufferings for the Armenian Christians greater than their ancestors had to endure during the eight centuries that have passed since the first Turkish Conquest of Armenia. They have been years of misery, slaughter, martyrdom, agony, despair.”
And the years that have followed from 1896 to 1909 have had the same tale of woe to unfold; a tale of horrors such as have never been surpassed in the history of nations.
The opinion of the Turkish Pasha, “The way to get rid of the Armenian Question, is to get rid of the Armenians” was followed by “le Sultan Rouge,” and that the monster and assassin who sat on the Turkish throne from 1876 to 1909 was not able to accomplish this policy to the bitter end of complete extermination, was no doubt due to the grit and stubborn endurance of the victims.
A Turkish writer has made the remark, “There are Armenians, but there is no Armenia.” This assertion would be true if meant in a political sense only, for of all civilized races on earth, Armenians are politically one of the most forlorn, but the country has not been wiped off the map. It still occupies the geographical place it has held since history has been written. The land of the Euphrates and Tigris, that Araxes valley, where, as simple and primitive Armenians will to this day assert in unshaken belief, God made man in His own image, and the country round the base of Ararat, where the generations of men once more began to people the earth.
Once the land of Ararat was an independent kingdom until the tide of victory rolled over it and conquered its independence. Hemmed round by three Great Empires, Russian, Turkish and Persian, the unfortunate geographical position of the country became the cause of its people’s ruin.
It is of bitter interest to Armenians to know that Ararat is the point where the three Empires, Russian, Turkish and Persian, meet, whilst the children of the land of Ararat have passed under the sovereignties of Czar, Sultan and Shah. Thus it may be true that there is no Armenia in the political sense of the word, but if Armenia has lost her independence, the Armenian people have survived.
The Author of “Transcaucasia and Ararat” thus writes of them:—
“The Armenians are an extraordinary people, with a tenacity of national life scarcely inferior to that of the Jews.”