“The massacre of the Armenians came to an end on Friday, ... but the persecution of them which went on for months was worse than the massacre. The business was destroyed, they plundered and blackmailed without mercy, they were hunted like wild beasts, they were imprisoned, tortured, killed, deported, fled the country, until the Armenian population of the city was reduced by some seventy-five thousands, mostly men, including those massacred.... The poverty and distress of those left alive in Constantinople was often heartrending, and many women and children died of slow starvation.
“Sir Michael Herbert, the British charge d’affaires, and some of the ambassadors did what they could to stop the massacre of the Armenians, ... but the ‘concert of Europe’ did nothing. It accepted the situation. The Emperor of Germany went farther. He sent a special embassy to present to the sultan a portrait of his family as a token of his esteem.”[148]
We would have thought it would have been better to give Sultan Hamid enough time to wash his hands of the blood of the Armenians before giving him the portrait of the imperial family. But the King of Prussia thought that Abdul Hamid needed a friend then more than any other time, and the world also may know that Emperor William II of Germany was the friend of the great assassin. We wonder whether congeniality is a condition of friendship among rulers as it is among individuals.
In his Guildhall speech, November 9, 1896, Lord Salisbury was heard again. He declared that England would adhere to the European concert, yet the veto of any one power, meant that the concert could not act, he also admitted that to act separately from the concert would bring about a war; England was not prepared for this, because her strength consisted in her navy, and no fleet in the world could “get over the mountains of Taurus to protect the Armenians.” Thus the European Powers agreed to disagree to force the sultan to be truthful and fulfill his promises of reform, or even to stop his cruel work of extermination of a nation. The result of this disagreement to coerce the sultan to act humanely, and the Powers hiding themselves behind the European concert, was to leave Abdul Hamid to do as he pleased. And he pleased thus: From Constantinople to Van, from the shores of the Black Sea to the shores of the Mediterranean, “with inexpressible cruelty 150,000 men, women, and children were killed, burned or buried alive, and yet Europe seemed powerless.”[149] Why was (or seemed) Europe powerless? Because the veto of any one power meant that the Concert could not act. What power or powers did the vetoing? We have no desire to incriminate any power, for all are guilty. But the evidence, judging by the events past and present, strongly points to the power which has been in desperate love with the modern Jezebel, the only Mohammedan power, for a political wedlock. This political matrimony has been consummated in the autumn of 1914. But let us look back to the time of the courtship.
In 1888 German financiers secured concession from the sultan for a railroad in Asia Minor. And German colonists and expansionists “dreamed of linking the Baltic Sea with the Persian gulf and carrying the Teutonic empire across Asia.” Since then “the government had sedulously cultivated its influence over Turkey.” And shortly after the massacre of ten thousand Armenians in Constantinople, the kaiser, by a special embassy presented to the sultan the Imperial Family Portrait as a “token of esteem.”
FOOTNOTES:
[141] Lepsius, “Armenia and Europe.” See The New Armenia of June 15, 1916, New York.
[142] The Public Ledger (Philadelphia), Feb. 17, 1896, had the following editorial comment on a local Turkish official report: “What purports to be an official list of Turkish outrages in the Province of Harpoot and some of the neighboring villages, prepared by a local Turkish authority, is published. The total number killed is given as 39,234, and the number of destitute as 94,770. The account is somewhat mysterious, as it does not show for what purpose it was made, nor does the report state how a matter, usually so jealously guarded, came to be made public, but it is authoritative, and the details are more sickening than the bare aggregate, as they show the number of persons burned to death; the number who perished from hunger and cold; the number of women outraged; the number of forcible conversions to Islam; the number forcibly married to Moslems, etc. It is a chapter more worthy of the Dark Ages than modern civilization, but modern civilization does not seem able to prevent its repetition at the pleasure of the Turk.”
[143] Bliss, “Turkey and the Armenian Atrocities,” pp. 553-4.
[144] Greene, “Leavening the Levant,” p. 36.