Chapter V: Part I (2)

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.”

We have it on the authority of Professor Arminius Vambéry that the Czar Alexander III had given assurances of his friendship and support to Sultan Abdul Hamid; and there are not wanting political students who affirm that the Armenian Massacres were in part instigated by Russian politicians who saw, or professed to see, in a free Armenia an impediment to Russia’s advance in the south and a fostering of the spirit of independence in the Russian provinces of Armenia.[9] This on the authority of Mr. James Bryce was the reason which Prince Lobanoff assigned for his refusal to give support to British proposals of coercion towards Turkey. “On January 16, 1896,” so writes Mr. Bryce, “when the massacres had gone on for more than three months, he (Prince Lobanoff) ‘saw nothing to destroy his confidence in the bonne volonté of the Sultan, who was’ (”he felt assured“) ‘doing his best.’” And Mr. Bryce continues to add “Turkey, which in 1877 had looked to England for help against Russia, now turned to Russia for support against the menaces of England.”

We have it also on the authority of Mr. Bryce that shortly after the terrible and cold-blooded massacre of Armenians at Constantinople “the German Ambassador presented to the Sultan a picture of the German Imperial family which he had asked for some time ago”[10] and the friendship of Kaiser Wilhelm for Abdul Hamid “his friend and brother,” as an American writer has called him; the costly gifts presented by the ex-Sultan to the German Imperial family, the magnificent reception of the Kaiser at Constantinople, and the still more magnificent concession of Turkish territory to Germany, are too well known to the world to need any further comment.

Thus it became the fate of the unfortunate Armenians to be the bruised and mangled shuttle-cock of powerful bats.

(Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople).]

Much has been written and much has been said by great authorities, (far more comprehensively and by pens much more forcible than my humble efforts could aspire to reach) against the selfishness and callousness, the inhumanity and cynicism of those great powers which have coldly looked on and permitted the hellish atrocities and horrors of the Armenian Massacres. The name of William Ewart Gladstone is loved and revered by Armenians all over the world; but the thunderings of that veteran statesman and the denouncing protests of those thoughtful men whose feelings of revolted humanity have made themselves heard in sounding language, have fallen on stony ground; they have been like the voices of men crying out in the wilderness. Europe has turned a deaf ear to the condemnations of justice and truth, even as she has turned a deaf ear to the voice of Rahel weeping for her slaughtered children.

The victim of Abdul Hamid’s revenge who was stealthily murdered in his bed. He was elected Patriarch in 1843 and held the highest place in the esteem and affection of his people. Mr. James Bryce gives his age at the time of his election in 1843 as seventy-three; if this is correct then he was over a hundred years old when he was foully murdered. Mr. Bryce writes of him as, “the worthy leader of his nation,” “a man of high character and great ability.”

A writer signing himself Beyzadé gives the following account of the Patriarch’s tragic death in the July number of “The Wide World:”

The attempted poisoning and subsequent death of Monseigneur
Nercès Varjabétian, the Armenian Patriarch and Archbishop of
Constantinople, was a revolting illustration of the inhuman and
barbarous tactics of the Yildiz Kiosk “Camarilla.” Monseigneur
Nercès Varjabétian was not only one of the most prominent
prelates of the Armenian Church, but was also a fearless
patriot--a distinguished linguist, an eloquent preacher, and
a thorough gentleman in every sense of the word. When peace
was concluded between Turkey and Russia, and preparations were
being made for the Berlin Congress, it was he who, in spite of
the feared fanatical uprising of the Turks, threw prudence to
the winds and took a step that will long be remembered in the
annals of Armenian history.

At the first meeting of the Berlin Congress the Turkish
delegates were thunderstruck to learn from official sources
that an Armenian delegation had arrived from Constantinople,
sent by Monseigneur Nercès, the Patriarch, their object being
to request the signatory Powers of the Berlin Treaty to force a
guarantee from the Turkish Government to make certain important
improvements in Armenia.

Abdul Hamid and his advisers were furious at this affront, and
Monseigneur Nercès was summoned to the Palace. It is said that
when he received the summons he simply smiled and asked one of
his curates to read the Burial Service to him, as he did not
expect to return alive. However, he went. No one has ever heard
what passed between the Sultan and himself at the interview;
suffice it to say that he immediately summoned the Armenian
General Assembly and tendered his resignation. This was not
accepted by the Assembly, and, amidst enthusiastic cheers,
he was carried back to his apartments at the Patriarchate.
Meanwhile a peremptory order reached him, signed by the Sultan,
to recall the Armenian delegation from Berlin. This Monseigneur
Varjabétian point-blank refused to do, and retired to his
private residence at Haskeuy, a village on the Golden Horn.
The success of the delegation, however, did not come up to
his expectations. The Armenians, as it happened, could not be
heard, but they were so far successful as to have an article
inserted in the treaty.

The Sultan and his advisers never forgave the Patriarch this,
though they could not openly do anything to him on account of
his enormous popularity. Time passed on, and to all appearance
the incident was forgotten, but it was not so. One summer
afternoon a most cordial invitation was sent by a very high
dignitary of the Palace, requesting the Archbishop to dine
with him informally. An invitation of this kind could not very
well be refused, so the Archbishop, accompanied only by a
body-servant named Vartan, repaired to the Pasha’s house. The
Pasha received him at the door and escorted the visitor with
much ceremony and extreme courtesy to a private apartment of
the salamlik of his house (the men’s quarters), where dinner
was served. The geniality displayed by his host dispelled any
fears that the Archbishop might have had as to his personal
safety.

After dinner, as usual, coffee was served. Now, this serving
of the coffee is rather a ceremonial according to high Turkish
etiquette, and it is not unusual for guests to bring their
own _tchooboukdar_ (the servant who carries his master’s pipe
and pouch and also superintends the making of his coffee).
The Archbishop was presented with a “tchoobouk” (pipe) filled
and lighted for smoking, and a servant followed with coffee.
The Archbishop accepted both with due compliments to his
host, and took a sip at his coffee. Just at that moment the
heavy curtains over the doorway were thrown apart, revealing
the ghastly pale face of his servant Vartan, who cried, in
Armenian, in a voice trembling with emotion, “Monseigneur, I
did not brew the coffee!”

This was enough for the Archbishop; he pretended to be
startled and spilt the coffee, but, alas! he had already
drunk a small quantity of it. Meanwhile a scuffle was going
on behind the _portière_, where his poor servant Vartan was
paying the penalty of his devotion to his master. Concerning
Vartan’s whereabouts or his ultimate end nothing was ever
made public--the poor fellow simply vanished. Monseigneur
Varjabétian, after a short interval thanked the Pasha for his
generous and kind hospitality and took his departure. On the
way home he was taken violently ill and a doctor was hastily
summoned. The Patriarch took to his bed, and lost all his hair
through the effects of the poison. Then, one morning, when a
servant took his breakfast upstairs he found, to his horror,
that both the bedroom door and the window were wide open and
his beloved master lay dead in his bed, which was covered with
blood! There are no such things as coroners and juries in
Turkey to ascertain the causes of mysterious deaths of this
kind, but the news that the Patriarch was dead spread like
wildfire through Constantinople. The Sultan himself thought it
advisable to show some concern in the matter, and aides-de-camp
from the Palace were sent to the Patriarchate to learn the
full details of this “sad catastrophe,” as they termed it. The
official statement was that the Archbishop died of dysentery.
Only a very few know how the Archbishop had died, and they
wisely kept their mouths shut.

I was told the details of this story by a high official of the
Armenian Patriarchate. It seems that as the poison did not act
as quickly as the Patriarch’s enemies had anticipated, owing
to his having been cautioned in the nick of time, they “had
to resort to other means”! The funeral was the largest ever
witnessed in Constantinople, with an escort of Turkish cavalry
sent specially by the Sultan, and representatives of all the
religious denominations and the Diplomatic Corps. I was myself
present, representing a foreign Government.