Betrayed Armenia

The Armenians have been called “the most determined of Christians,” a remark the truth of which has been borne out by their unequalled martyrdom for their faith; and yet it may truly be said that in no Christian Church is the lay element more strong than it is in the Armenian Church. Conscious of this freedom, Armenians are surprised to read assertions made by some writers, about “the gross superstitions” of their Church, which they on their part regard as the happy medium between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Surrounded with pomp and splendour, and a show of outward ceremonies, which the average Armenian regards as no more than mere adjuncts to gratify and impress the sensibilities, the Liturgy of the Armenian Church, in its grandeur and pathos, appeals to the heart of the Armenian people, as no other form of worship can; it is the reason, as has truly been said of them, that “they carry their religion with them wherever they go.”

The Armenians have also been called “the interpreters between the East and the West.” There is no doubt a certain adaptability which is a national characteristic; and as language is the vehicle of comprehension, their talent for acquiring languages helps to bring them into touch with Eastern and Western peoples; but the main truth of the observation lies in the fact, that being born Asiatics, and living for the most part in the midst of Asiatic surroundings, they fall into the ways of Asiatic life; they understand Asiatics better, and know how to sympathise with them; whilst on the other hand, their religion is the religion which has moulded the thought of the West, and consequently also the religion that has moulded the thought of a people who were the earliest Christians.

The main point of social difference between them and other Asiatic nations, lies in the exalted position occupied by their women, and this point of difference may be traced to that one cause or influence, which has exalted the position of women in the West, the doctrines of Jesus of Nazareth. This point of difference in social life, together with the difference of religion, has always kept them separate from Persian and Turk.

Private and trustworthy information to hand brings the news that the ex Sultan Abdul Hamid, aware of his impending dethronement, desired to bring about a general massacre of Christians in Constantinople, beginning with the foreign Embassies downwards. “I must be the last Padishah, even though Turkey perish,” was Abdul’s frantic appeal to his satellites, but his minions, not daring to venture on so dangerous an undertaking, planned the massacres to begin at the village of Adana, inhabited by the unfortunate Armenians. It was a safe plan, since the Armenians had no battleships to turn their guns upon Constantinople, and by the bombardment of the capital, to seek revenge for the murder of their countrymen.

A massacre so wanton as that of Adana, can only find its counterpart in the other Turkish massacres of Armenians which preceded it.

“Abdul the Damned” has been dethroned, but he has not been executed, and so long as he continues to draw breath, as long is there danger for the Armenians.

We hear of the Mahommedans in India cabling their petition to the new Turkish Government to spare the life of the ex-Padishah and the ex-Caliph of Islam; the erstwhile “God’s shadow on earth” and the erstwhile “God’s envoy on earth” the sacredness of whose person should be inviolate. In this demonstration of the Indian Mahommedans, we can read the epistle of Mahommedan thought, and feel the pulse of Mahommedan feeling all over the Sunni Moslem world.

Although intensely mercenary, Abdul Hamid however not only never grudged the gold which helped to accomplish the Armenian massacres, but he used it largely in douceurs which purchased silence or false representations of his diabolical acts, and it was by means of such douceurs that he went farther than seducing merely his own subjects.

“Mais l’oeuvre de l’impérial corrupteur a dépassé les limites de son Palais et de ses États, N’a-t-il pas, en effet, étouffé sous des baillons dorés la voix d’importants organes de la presse européenne? N’a-t-il pas acheté à l’étranger des politiciens et même des diplomates?

“Saïd Pacha ayant recherché ce qu’en six mois les massacres d’Arménie avaient coûté au Trésor turc, en allocations à certains journaux européens, a établi le compte approximatif suivant: 640 décorations, et 235,000 Livres Turques (près de cinq millions et demi)!”8

It needs not be added that no one who knows the truth of Turkish affairs, doubts the truth of this impeachment.

“But whatever the future may bring, the past is past, and will one day fall to be judged. And of the judgement of posterity there can be little doubt.”

In these memorable words, Mr. James Bryce in the supplementary chapter of his book “Transcaucasia and Ararat” concludes his criticism on what he calls “the fatal action followed by the fatal inaction of the European Powers.”

It is true. As surely as the world revolves on her own axis, and as day succeeds night, so surely History will record and Posterity will judge. But what compensation to the Armenians? What compensation for the rivers of blood that have inundated their land? What atonement for the hideous past? What relief for the present? What hope for the future?

THE ARMENIAN MASSACRES AND THE FUTURE OF THE ARMENIANS

The above is a subject for profound meditation for the Armenian people; it has therefore naturally for me occupied much deep thought.

National Autonomy has been the dream of the Armenians; a dream which through centuries of oppression and years of slaughter, the nation has been striving and struggling to realize. The oldest of historical nations, we have held to our nationality, language and religion; we have struggled and striven, and though billows of affliction have swept over us, we have not allowed ourselves to be engulfed. “Love is stronger than Death” and truly the Armenian has loved his nationality with a steadfastness and tenacity that has conquered death.

Steady, stubborn grit, combined with a remarkable natural intelligence have been characteristics of the race, and have kept us alive in spite of national adversities, such as no other nation could have suffered and survived.

But our position is an acutely unhappy and an acutely unfortunate one. Our misfortunes began with the physical geography of our country. Surrounded by three great empires, our kingdom was strangled by the overwhelming pressure, and to-day our country is divided up between Russia, Turkey and Persia. For this reason we have been a great deal more unfortunate than the Balkan States, and now if there were any possible chance of wresting autonomy for Turkish Armenia from Turkey, Russia fearing the spread of the same spirit in her own provinces, would assuredly not only frown on such an attempt but use all the means in her power to crush it.

There is also a stern fact which a people so politically helpless and forlorn as ourselves must ever bear in mind, namely, that we live in an intensely selfish and intensely grasping world; no prating the pretty nonsense of Western Civilization, or Western Humanity, or Western Christianity can alter that stern hard fact as it stands, and as it has stood since the history of our world has been written.

Indeed, nineteenth century civilization, which has made the world of commerce acutely grasping, has also made the world of Politics unscrupulously selfish.

However much it may clothe itself in the garment of fair speech, what we call “Politics” is actually made up of that one devouring, absorbing, grasping element – Selfishness. “The friends of to-day may be enemies to-morrow” is more truly spoken in the domain of Politics than anywhere else.

Let the Armenians take a lesson not only from the Turkish massacres, but from the attitude of Europe towards those massacres? Let them look back on the past, and remember how they have been trampled under the merciless foot of Political Selfishness, and then left to welter in their gore.

Who doubts, who can gainsay, that by so much as the lifting up of a finger the Powers of Europe could have stopped those massacres? Was that finger ever lifted up, however, all through the long years of “slaughter, martyrdom, agony, despair” to save our helpless people from butcheries so enormous, so hideous, so appalling that no pen could portray the horrible realities? Had the Turkish bonds been in jeopardy, Constantinople harbour would have witnessed the battleships of the Powers of Europe discharging their cannon on the capital of the Turkish Empire, but a hundred thousand or five hundred thousand Armenians, more or less, mangled and butchered to death, or fleeing from their sacked and burning villages to die of cold and starvation in their mountain passes, could not rouse action on the part of Europe, even though the Concert of Europe had been instrumental in their destruction.

I do not write with a desire to indulge in recriminations, since vain recriminations will not bear profitable fruit; but I write with the object of impressing on my countrymen to remember, always to remember, the lessons written on the pages of a past that should never be forgotten by us.

In his book “Our Responsibilities for Turkey” the late Duke of Argyll quotes from the famous despatch of a British Ambassador to Turkey, the date being given as September 4, 1876. The despatch proceeds thus: —

“To the accusation of being a blind partisan of the Turks I will only answer that my conduct here has never been guided by any sentimental affection for them, but by a firm determination to uphold the interests of Great Britain to the utmost of my power; and that those interests are deeply engaged in preventing the disruption of the Turkish Empire is a conviction which I share in common with the most eminent statesmen who have directed our foreign policy, but which appears now to be abandoned by shallow politicians or persons who have allowed their feelings of revolted humanity to make them forget the capital interests involved in the question.

“We may and must feel indignant at the needless and monstrous severity with which the Bulgarian insurrection was put down; but the necessity which exists for England to prevent changes from occurring here which would be most detrimental to ourselves is not affected by the question whether it was 10,000 or 20,000 persons who perished in the suppression.

“We have been upholding what we know to be a semi-civilized nation, liable under certain circumstances to be carried into fearful excesses; but the fact of this having just now been strikingly brought home to us all cannot be a sufficient reason for abandoning a policy which is the only one that can be followed with due regard to our interest.”

I quote this famous despatch merely to point out that “due regard to our interest” was carefully followed out in the Past by the Powers of Europe, and that “due regard to our interest” will be just as carefully followed out in the Present and in the Future.

From the Turk and Persian, the Armenian must ever remain separate, as he has through centuries, though living in the midst of them, remained separate. The gulf that divides the one nation from the other two, the wall of iron that rises between them is the position of woman. The Armenian has accepted whole-heartedly the position in which woman has been placed by the Great Founder of his faith. For seventeen hundred years unremittingly since Christianity was revived in Armenia by Gregory the Illuminator, the Christian law with regard to the position of woman has moulded the thought of the nation, it has left its impress on the nation, and it is this vital and essential difference between the law of Mahommed and the law of Christ that like a two-edged sword has cleaved apart Christian Armenian from Moslem Turk and Persian.

If “East is East, and West is West” it is on account of the social plane on which woman stands, a social plane that is never so degraded in any corner of Asia, as it is in the countries where the law of Mahommed governs.

The Armenians in Asiatic Turkey are scattered and dispersed among Turks and other antagonistic races; they are without any military force or organization to wrest autonomy from the military and governing power. That Europe should aid their endeavours, or that Turkey should make them a free gift of autonomy, are both of them absolutely out of the question. Then what remains for us?

To hold to our own nationality and to be subject – Subject to Russia, subject to Turkey, subject to Persia – What shall it profit us? What will it profit? What doth it profit us? Our strong, clever, energetic men, our beautiful, intelligent women, when neither chance nor opportunity can enable our finest and best to reach the higher rungs of the world’s ladder, and when as a subject people we must ever remain hewers of wood and drawers of water, even our Aivasowskis and our Melikoffs have been known to the world as Russians, not as Armenians. Have we a chance of bursting the fetters? Have we strength to break the chains? Can we reach the goal toward which, bleeding and torn, we have been striving, and still are striving? These are questions which we must ask ourselves; looking them soberly in the face.

But this is not enough: if we must persist in holding to our nationality, we must look into ourselves, we must search out and probe our national failings and our national weaknesses, and find out in what essential characteristics we are wanting as a nation, and so build up national character. Let us weigh ourselves in the balance, and supply what in us is found wanting.

In the period of less than a decade a Great Power has risen in the Orient. The people of a small island empire with an empty Treasury have beaten successfully and disastrously a colossal empire of whom the Powers of Europe had stood in awe, and against whom not one had ventured single-handed to engage.

On the field the ever victorious army of little Japan undermined Russia’s stronghold, and succeeded in driving back and ever driving back the ever defeated and ever retreating army of colossal Russia. At sea the ever victorious Japanese Fleet succeeded in completely annihilating the Russian Fleet. It was war such as the world had never yet seen. The secret of such astounding successes should be investigated, and here I beg leave to quote from one of a series of articles in which I gave view to my opinions during the Russo-Japanese War. “Japan may be likened to the bundle of faggots in the fable firmly tied together; one faggot of larger dimensions in the centre, the sovereign round whom the whole nation clusters, and all, ruler and people tied together by adamantine bands of patriotism.”

These remarks of mine were based on observations of actual facts. In national unity Japan stands as an object lesson to the world; she furnishes an example which the world needs to copy, and which a nation so politically forlorn as ourselves more than any other needs to copy.

From the astounding success of Japan let us turn to the position the Great Republic of the United States of America occupies in the world, and take the lesson to heart of what Union can accomplish as we contrast their present position with the position that the handful of puritan pilgrims occupied when they first landed on American soil not quite three hundred years ago.

National Unity is our greatest need; it is the banner which we must raise up over our national life. National Unity must be engraven on the tablets of our minds and throb in the pulses of our hearts. There are mountains of difficulties before us, and if ever we must reach the goal we can only do so by being bound together like the bundle of faggots in the fable, with no weakening or loosening of the bands. Then perhaps we might once more be able to get an independent footing on the historical soil of our fathers, and perhaps once more rally round our own flag. A Japanese lives for the State, not for himself; we have no State for which to live, but let us live for our communities whilst we keep the hope in our hearts that communities grow into States.

We have grit and endurance in an unparalleled degree, but these characteristics will profit us nothing if we are wanting in unity.

Let us remember that utterance of the Founder of our faith. In our loyalty and allegiance to Him our life-blood has flowed like the torrents of a cataract, but we must remember His warning utterance: —

“What shall it profit a man.” What shall it profit a nation. Unity is the soul of a nation. Let us keep our soul and not lose it.

THE ARMENIAN MASSACRES AND CIVILIZED EUROPE

“Hear then ye Senates! hear this truth sublime,They who allow Oppression share the crime.”

“A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping; Rahel weeping for her children refused to be comforted for her children, because they were not.”

In the twentieth century of the christian era, in the age of trumpeted progress, of boasted and vaunted civilization, there is a Ramah of countries, a desolated Ramah, blackened and calcined with the fires of oppression, and over her desolated wastes there flows, flows, continually flows, ever replenished and ever renewed, that red stream which crieth up from the earth to God: and out of this modern Ramah, a voice is heard of lamentation and bitter weeping, it riseth up in its boundless anguish to reach the heavens, it crieth out and will not be stopped, for it is the voice of the Rahel of nations weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are not.

Ah! thou Rahel of nations! to the cry of thy boundless anguish, to thy lamentation and bitter weeping, Christendom and Civilization, the Christendom and Civilization of Europe have replied “Are we thy children’s keepers?”

Who that has read the history of the Crusades has not turned with sickening disgust from the chapters wherein history has recorded the savage barbarities and fearful excesses of those christian warriors, who went to Palestine ostensibly fired with the enthusiasm of a holy cause, but in reality only to glut in slaughter and gratify brutal passions. Europe has, however, designated her past as the “dark ages” into which she has thrust back, the ferocious outbursts of religion, the merciless persecutions of the church, the savage sweep of the barbarians of the north, and the unbridled tyrannies of despotic power, from all which she loudly boasts to have emancipated herself, and like the evolution according to the Darwinian theory of the anthropomorphal ape, to have progressed into the state of civilization. But beginning from the last quarter of the nineteenth and on into the first decade of the twentieth century, the horrors of the darkest ages in human history have lain at her doors, and towards these horrors Europe has kept up the role of an extenuatingly disclaiming, a mildly rebuking, sweetly frowning, smilingly denouncing, Disapprover.

Half a million Armenians annihilated by organized massacres of the most ferocious and hideous natures, and perhaps a corresponding number fated either to rot to death in Turkish prisons or made homeless and destitute to die of cold and starvation, with Europe nonchalantly looking on is surely convincing proof that the Humanity, Christianity and Civilization of Europe are whited sepulchres, hiding by the smooth outside the rottenness within; therefore ye priests of the gospel come down from your pulpits, close your churches, hold your tongues and be silent for ever, for the Christianity you preach has bowed itself out, if ever it existed, in Christian Europe. The Christ of Europe is the demon of greed and the demon of land hunger, and the god of civilization is Mammon.

In 1878 an astounding policy was carried out by Great Britain; it was the crowning act of her long continued support to Turkey, a government she knew to be hopelessly vicious and profoundly cruel and bad to the core. With this Power, England posing before the world as the home of freedom, the friend of the oppressed, and the defender of the rights and liberties of man, entered into a Convention. It was called the “Anglo-Turkish Convention,” of which Article I reads thus:

“If Batum, Ardahan, Kars, or any of them, shall be retained by Russia, and if any attempt shall be made at any future time by Russia to take possession of any further territories of his Imperial Majesty the Sultan in Asia, as fixed by the definitive Treaty of Peace, England engages to join his Imperial Majesty the Sultan in defending them by force of arms. In return his Imperial Majesty the Sultan promises to England to introduce necessary reforms, to be agreed upon later between the two Powers, into the government and for the protection of the Christian and other subjects of the Porte in these territories. And in order to enable England to make necessary provision for executing her engagement, his Imperial Majesty the Sultan further consents to assign the island of Cyprus to be occupied and administered by England.”

It is well to remark here what was blazoned to the world at the time that part of those “necessary reforms” “in these territories” include twenty-two large organized massacres of Armenians (besides smaller ones) dating from September 30th, 1895 to December 29th, 1895; and be it remembered that these were massacres of a hideousness and ferocity of nature even devils could not rival; besides also other organized massacres by the Turkish Government of the same nature (large and small) both before and after that period.

The British press, followed by a large section of the British public, raged against what they called the advance of Russia in the East, as they had already raged for half a century past. It is astonishing how one nation can swallow its own camels and strain at the other’s gnats.

However, this Anglo-Turkish Convention and the Congress at Berlin was the crowning act of England’s support and defense of a power whose rule had been characterized by mis-rule, massacre and oppression. Her prime minister returned from the Congress of Berlin loudly proclaiming “Peace with Honour.” Of that “Honour” Time has been the test, and Time has revealed to the world that “Peace” in its true character.

Dating from the Congress of Berlin the supreme tragedy of Armenia begins; deliberately and without compunction England revived the dying tyranny of Turkey for the Armenians, deliberately and without compunction she took away from them (a people politically the most helpless and forlorn of all civilized nations) the only protection they had of a powerful neighbour willing and able to enforce its protection, and rivetted on their necks the yoke of the cruellest oppressor that the world had yet known. The history of the rule of the house of Osman up to the thirty-fourth Padishah was knowledge enough and experience enough for the British Government and the British people, and yet in the last quarter of the civilized nineteenth century, the great and enlightened Christian power of Great Britain proceeded to carry out and complete this gigantic political crime of fastening on the necks of a struggling Christian people, the last remnants of an ancient civilization, the merciless yoke of their oppressors. From that time onward history must mark the course of the supreme tragedy of Armenia.

The bold move taken by the Patriarch Nerses of sending delegates to the Congress of Berlin cost the renowned prelate his life, his firm refusal to recall his delegates aroused the last fury of Turkey’s Padishah; the Patriarch was stealthily murdered and his genius and great personal influence lost to the cause of his people.

But a loss greater than the loss of their beloved leader befell the Armenians in the assassination of the Emperor Alexander II, whose untimely death plunged Russia back into the night of ignorance, bigotry and superstition, of the savagery and slavery, out of the darkness of which he was leading her; the best and noblest of Czars was succeeded by a son whose policy shaped itself directly contrary to that of his father’s, and Russia from being the help of the Armenians under Turkish rule turned into one of the pillars of support of their oppressor.

“Since 1884,” writes Mr. James Bryce, “it has been generally understood in Constantinople that the Russian Embassy has made no serious effort to bring about any radical change in Turkish administration, and it was indeed believed that the more England remonstrated the more did Russia point out to the Sultan how much he had erred in supposing that England was his friend.”