CHAPTER III

The Preservation of the Armenian Element is Absolutely Indispensable to the Well-being and Prosperity of the Ottoman Empire. It has been Proved through Centuries that Christians and Moslems are Able to Live in Peace and Amity in Turkey, which is Equally the Country of Both.

ONE hesitates, on general principles, to attempt to advise, or to admonish, as to its best interests, a nation at war. In a life and death struggle such as this war has become, it would be naturally supposed that anation and its rulers are the best judges of what it is to their interest to do. Advice from outside sources is open to the suspicion of being not disinterested. And does not admonition, if not sheer impertinence, betray impotence on the part of the admonisher?

But in the Ottoman Empire, the situation is different from that of any other country in Europe. There is not a sufficient number of educated men among the non-Christian elements of the Ottoman Empire to form, let alone to guide, public opinion. Consequently, there is no public opinion. The governing power has always been in the hands of a small and corrupt circle, and the Ottoman nation has not developed in self-government, in popular institutions, as have the other nations of Europe.

The new régime was hailed with joy by the outside world, and by the non-Moslem elements inside the empire as well, because the Constitution of 1908 was regarded as the starting point in a struggle of the people of the empire, irrespective of religion and race, against an absolutism that had in practice proved equally injurious, if not equally oppressive, to all the races subjected to the tyranny of Yildiz Kiosk.

It was very soon seen, however, that Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity had no part whatever in the Young Turk conception of a constitutional state. It was simply the replacing of one clique by another. The honest, sincere Young Turks, with motives above suspicion, who actually meant what they said, were so few in number that they could not prevailagainst the type in the Committee of Union and Progress, personified by such men as Talaat, Enver, Djavid, Djemal, Hairi, Ahmed Riza, Dr. Nazim, Hadji Adil, Bedri, and Hussein Djahid. The Moslem population of the empire, being intensely ignorant, could not be looked to by the few enthusiasts to support constitutional principles. The Christian population, much better educated and having much more reason to appreciate the newly-proclaimed liberty, were the only elements upon which a politically regenerated Turkey could stand.For this reason alone did the Armenian element become immediately a source of danger to the new clique that had replaced Abdul Hamid.These so-called Young Turks turned upon the Armenians just as Abdul Hamid had turned upon them—toprevent their becoming the leaven in the regeneration of Turkey. The Constitution, hailed by the Armenians as the beginning of their political emancipation, became almost immediately—andinevitably—their death-warrant.

One does not need to study deeply, one has simply to read the history of the Ottoman Empire since Great Britain and France saved the Turks by the Crimean War, to realize that the Armenians, from the moment the question of “reforms” was introduced by the Powers in their dealings with the Sublime Porte, have been the unwitting victims of the cause of civilization in the Near East. The Congress of Berlin fully recognized this fact.

The trans-Caucasian policy of Russia, and the Balkan policy of all the GreatPowers first awakened, and has since been the exciting cause of, the fanaticism of the Moslems of Turkey against the Armenians. Before there was an acute “Question of the Orient,” did we ever have great Armenian massacres? And yet, Christian Europe never made a concerted effort to save this unhappy race from the results of Europe’s own dealings with the Turks.

The Armenians, of course, always suffered to a certain extent from their social and political disabilities under Moslem rule. But they have lived for centuries in comparative security, and certainly with a large measure of prosperity, as Ottoman subjects. Personal relations between Turks and Armenians have been not at all bad. I have had opportunity to observe this fact in different parts ofTurkey. The Turks are not, like the Arabs, a fanatical people by nature. The persecution and massacre of Armenians is not, as the general European and American public have erroneously thought, an age-old matter of religious strife. Nor has it been, as is so frequently asserted by those who have the effrontery to explain and attempt to condone (ye gods!) Armenian massacres, because the Armenians are money-lenders and oppress the simple-minded Turks. The refutation of the first of these two prevalent beliefs is that the great Armenian massacres are events of the last quarter of a century, while Armenians and Turks have been living together in Asia Minor nearly seven centuries. The refutation of the second is that the massacres have not been confined to the larger cities, where many ofthe Armenians are well-to-do, but have always taken place in exactly the same way and in exactly the same degree in communities where the Armenians are both ignorant and poverty-stricken.

Nothing is more stupid, nothing more against nature and history, than advocating that the solution of the Armenian question and salvation of the Armenian race is in emigrationen masseto America or some other country. The Armenians are an indigenous element in Asiatic Turkey. Their wholesale emigration might save the lives of several hundred thousand individuals. But it would break the hearts of most of those who were thus saved, and it would mark the disappearance of the Armenians as a race and a nation, just as certainly as if their extermination by massacre werecompleted. What has the Armenian race done that it should disappear? And is notjus solias strong as thejus patris—especially in lands where there is sunshine?

The preservation of the Armenian element in Asia Minor is indispensable to the well-being and prosperity of the Turks themselves. Politically, as well as economically, it is impossible for the Turks to continue to exist as an independent, and in any measure at all self-supporting, nation without the help of the Armenians. The Armenian massacres illustrate the old story of killing the goose that laid the golden egg. In their pitiful ignorance, in their frenzy of blood-lust, the Turks are turning upon and destroying those whose existence is precious and vital to their community and nationallife. Travel where you will through Turkey, from one end of the great empire to the other, and you find no communitythat is prosperouswithout Armenians. Along the seacoast, the Greeks play an important part in the economic life of Turkey. But in the interior the Armenians are asine qua nonto the Turks.

Of the Armenians in Turkey one might have said without fear of contradiction before the terrible events of the past six months, that they were in no place numerically strong enough to jeopardize the political independence of the Ottoman Empire, but that they were everywhere in sufficient number to guarantee its economic independence.

Intelligent and patriotic Turks must certainly see that the attempt to exterminate the Armenians, or to banish theremnant of them from Asia Minor, is a mortal blow to Turkish independence, political as well as economic. The extermination of the Armenians is to the interest of a certain nation—but that nation is not Turkey!

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