“If Sultan Abd-ul-Hamid would come out of his palace, restore to the Porte its full responsibility, disband its secret police, trust his Mohammedan subjects, and do simple justice to the Christians, his life would be far more secure than it is to-day, with all precautions; his people and all the world would recognize the great and noble qualities which they now ignore, and welcome him as the wisest and best of all the Sultans....
“The sad pity of it is that he will never do it. It is too late. The influence of the Palace favorites is too strong. He will appear in history not as the Sultan who saved the Empire, but as the one who might have saved it and did not.”
CHAPTER VII.
PREVIOUS ACTS OF THE TURKISH TRAGEDY.
In this chapter[[34]] I shall take no account of events that have taken place in legitimate warfare, where the slain were foreign enemies or rebellious subjects of the Sultan, resisting with arms in their hands after being ordered to submit. The “insurgents”—as the Porte has called them—in all these cases have consisted of men, women, children, and infants, and in each case, by a curious coincidence, have been non-Mohammedan.
In all of these massacres, Turkish military or civil officers presided and directed the bloody work, as will be seen by reference to the authorities mentioned. There have been many other massacres of less than ten thousand during the intervals, which, to use the language of Beder Khan in Mosul (see Layard’s Nineveh), have confirmed the whole Turkish principle, that “the Armenians were becoming too numerous, and needed diminishing.”
This item of Turkey’s account, for the past seventy-five years only, stands about as follows:
DEFENSELESS CHRISTIAN SUBJECTS MASSACRED IN TURKEY 1820 TO 1894.
| 1822. | Greeks, especially in Scio (Chios) | 50,000 | [[35]] |
| 1850. | Nestorians and Armenians, Kurdistan | 10,000 | [[36]] |
| 1860. | Maronites and Syrians, Lebanon and Damascus | 11,000 | [[37]] |
| 1876. | Bulgarians, Bulgaria | 10,000 | [[38]] |
| 1894. | Armenians, Armenia, Sassoun | 12,000 | [[39]] |
| Total | 93,000 |
The above figures indicate the extent of the massacres mentioned. The following extracts reveal the occasion and manner in which they were carried out.
The first extract is in regard to the Greeks, and is a translation, by Mr. Robert Stein, from the French: