There is another sequel to the Berlin Treaty and to the attitude of the powers, namely, its effect on the Turks themselves. The natural enmity and contempt of the Moslem rulers and population generally for the Christian subjects has been greatly increased by reason of the pressure which foreign Powers have occasionally brought to bear on the Turks in order to procure relief for the Christian. To be sure the only hope of such relief is from without. But the pressure should not be of a petty, nagging and galling nature. This is worse than nothing. What is needed is prompt, decisive, and final action.
And things have now arrived at such a pass that in such action lies the only hope of preventing a terrible catastrophe, which will eclipse even the massacres of Sassoun. The wheels of progress will not go backward except as they are broken. The Christians of Armenia can be exterminated, but it is too late for them to accept slavery or Islam. They may be slaughtered like sheep, but they will not all die like dogs. The revolutionary movement, as it is called, is thus far nothing but a blind turning of the worm. It is ill considered, without resources, reckless, and foreign to the real spirit, objects, and methods of the Armenians on Turkish soil. It is not denied that there are a few Armenians in Europe who, in despair and for lack of better teaching, have imbibed Nihilistic views and are trying, in a very bungling way, to apply them. They are hated by the vast majority of Armenians in Turkey. They are related to the question at issue in the same way and degree as train wreckers and box-car burners were to the industrial problem during the riots of Chicago in July last, and deserve the same treatment. The Turks take great pains to thrust them into public notice, as a cloak for themselves, and with good success. The Turkish Government and its partisans, in order to conceal the real character of the massacre in Sassoun, has made persistent, extensive, and dishonorable use of a letter by the first President of Robert College, Constantinople, Dr. Cyrus Hamlin, written December 23, 1894. Dr. Hamlin’s vigorous and indignant protest may be found in Appendix [C].
ZEIBEK, TURKISH SOLDIER, “IRREGULAR.”
The idea of Armenian revolution is a new thing in the history of that peaceable race, which has quietly submitted for centuries to the yoke of the Turk. But it is the natural outcome of the horrible situation in Armenia since the Treaty of Berlin, and the disease is bound to grow more virulent and contagious until the European doctors apply vigorous and radical treatment to the “Sick Man.” It is difficult to see how anything but a surgical operation can be helpful. The knife has frequently been used in the case of this incurable patient during the present century, and always with excellent results, as for instance in the case of Greece, Lebanon, Bulgaria, Boznia-Herzegovina, and Egypt.
A situation in many respects parallel to that in Armenia existed until lately in Bosnia and Herzegovina. How quickly and completely that difficult problem has been solved, is narrated by M. de Blowitz in the October, 1894, issue of The Nineteenth Century, from which I condense in his own words.
“The orders, given after the taking over of the country, to surrender all arms or to destroy them, was given a sweeping application. Yet, before the victorious entry of the Austro-Hungarians, each Bosnian each Herzegovinian, was a walking arsenal.
“To-day weapons and ambuscades are things of the romantic past. Twelve years have sufficed, under M. de Kallay’s administration, not only to remove all traces of the wild, inhospitable, inaccessible Bosnia of which I have been speaking, but indeed and especially to banish even the memory of those dark days of strenuous battle, and to wipe away from the hearts of both invader and invaded all traces of the hate which then animated them. In the year 1882, the superior administration of the two provinces (Bosnia and Herzegovina) passed into the hands of the Minister of Finance of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who was then, and who is still, M. de Kallay. From this moment all is changed. The powers given to the new administration are almost unlimited. The civil element has been substituted for the military element, and pacification has succeeded conquest. The greatest effort is made to reassure all minds. Not a single minaret has disappeared, not a muezzin is deprived of his resources.”
A recent writer wisely says that “the Armenian question, if it ever be settled at all, must be taken out of the Turk’s hands, whether he like it or not.... And we have an opportunity now, which may never come our way again, of settling a difficulty which, if allowed to develop much longer, will prove more fruitful of mischief than any with which we have been confronted for a generation or more.”[[26]]
