One day Abdul Hamid sent for the Armenian Patriarch, the head of the Armenian Church. He received him in his palace directly overlooking the Bosphorus. The Sultan pointed to this stream and said: “If your Armenians do not stop agitating, I will make their blood flow like the Bosphorus out there!”
And now for nearly thirty years Turkey gave the world an illustration of government by massacre. We in Europe and America heard of these events when they reached especially monstrous proportions, as they did in 1895-96, when nearly 200,000 Armenians were most atrociously done to death. But through all these years the existence of the Armenians was one continuous nightmare. Their property was stolen, their men were murdered, their women were ravished, their young girls were kidnapped and forced to live in Turkish harems. All these things happened daily. Yet Abdul Hamid was not able to accomplish his full purpose; had he had his will, he would have massacred the whole nation in one hideous orgy. He attempted to do this in 1895, but found certain insuperable obstructions to his plan. Chief of these were England, France, and Russia. These atrocities called Gladstone, then eighty-six years old, from his retirement, and his speeches, in which he denounced the Sultan as “the Great Assassin” and “Abdul the Damned,” aroused the whole world to the enormities that were taking place. It became apparent that, unless the Sultan desisted, England, France, and Russia would intervene, and the Sultan well knew that, in case this intervention took place, such remnants of Turkey as had survived earlier partitions would disappear. Thus Abdul Hamid had to abandon his satanic enterprise of destroying a whole race by murder; yet Armenia continued to suffer the slow agony of pitiless persecution. Up to the outbreak of the European war not a day had passed in the Armenian vilayets without its outrages and its murders. The Young Turk régime, despite its promises of universal brotherhood, brought no respite to the Armenians. A few months after the love-feastings already described, one of the worst massacres took place at Adana, in which 35,000 people were destroyed.
And now the Young Turks, who had adopted so many of Abdul Hamid’s ideas, also made his Armenian policy their own. Their passion for Turkifying the nation seemed to demand logically the extermination of all Christians—Greeks, Syrians, and Armenians. Much as they admired the Mohammedan conquerors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they now perceived that these great warriors had made one fatal mistake, for they had had it in their power completely to obliterate the Christian populations and had neglected to do so. This policy, in their opinion, was a fatal error of statesmanship, and explained all the woes from which Turkey has suffered in modern times. Had these old Moslem chieftains, when they conquered Bulgaria, put all the Bulgarians to the sword, and peopled the Bulgarian country with Moslem Turks, there would never have been any modern Bulgarian problem, and Turkey would never have lost this part of her Empire. Similarly, had they destroyed all the Rumanians, Serbians, and Greeks, the provinces which are now occupied by these races would still have remained integral parts of the Sultan’s domain. They felt that the mistake had been a terrible one, but that something might be saved from the ruin. They would destroy all Greeks, Syrians, Armenians, and other Christians, move Moslem families into their homes and into their farms, and so make sure that these territories would not similarly be taken away from Turkey.
In order to accomplish this great reform it would not be necessary to murder every living Christian. The most beautiful and healthy Armenian girls could be taken, converted forcibly to Mohammedanism, and made the wives or concubines of devout followers of the Prophet. Their children would then automatically become Moslems and so strengthen the Empire as the Janissaries did in former years. These Armenian girls represent a high type of womanhood, and the Young Turks, in their crude, intuitive way, recognised that the mingling of their blood with the Turkish population would exert a eugenic influence upon the whole. Armenian boys of tender years could be taken into Turkish families and be brought up in ignorance of the fact that they were anything but Moslems. These were about the only elements, however, that could make any valuable contributions to the new Turkey which was now being planned. Since all precautions must be taken against the development of a new generation of Armenians, it would be necessary to kill outright all men who were in their prime and thus capable of propagating the accursed species. Old men and women formed no great danger to the future of Turkey, for they had already fulfilled their natural function of leaving descendants; still, they were nuisances and therefore should be disposed of.
Unlike Abdul Hamid, the Young Turks found themselves in a position where they could carry out this “holy” enterprise. Great Britain, France, and Russia had stood in the way of their predecessor. But now these obstacles had been removed. The Young Turks, as I have said, believed that while they were at war with these nations they had no representatives in Turkey who could interfere with their internal affairs. Only one Power could successfully raise objections, and that was Germany. But Germany had never attempted to stop massacres in Turkey. In 1898, when all the rest of Europe was ringing with Gladstone’s denunciations and demanding intervention, Kaiser Wilhelm the Second had gone to Constantinople, visited Abdul Hamid, pinned his finest decorations on that bloody tyrant’s breast, and kissed him on both cheeks. The same Kaiser who had done this in 1898 was still sitting on the throne in 1915, and was now Turkey’s ally. Thus for the first time in two centuries the Turks, in 1915, had their Christian populations utterly at their mercy. The time had finally come to make Turkey exclusively the country of the Turks.
