Diana Agabeg Apcar

“ 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. ”

“ Public Sentiment liberated Greece, The Lebanon, The Balkan States from Turkish Oppression. Slavery was abolished in the United States through Public Sentiment: but alas! does Public Sentiment sleep for this helpless Christian race. Are they not God’s creatures? have they not a right to live on God’s [11] earth as other nations? Does Humanity, does Christianity allow that tender babes and children should be hideously and horribly mutilated and butchered before the eyes of their mothers, or that the ears of mothers should be rent with the cries of the dying agony of their murdered children? ”

“ But oh! ye generous and kind hearted people! can any power under heaven assuage the heart anguish of this miserable residue? Can they be made by any means of human comfort to forget the black horrors or recover from the effects of the fires of the hideous affliction through which they have passed? What is there left for a woman who has seen with her own eyes the slaughter and heard with her own ears the dying cry of her murdered child? even her reason must give way under the stress of her anguish. ”

“ I pray that the shadow of those branches be extended over my bleeding nation.
ABDUL HAMID, THE TRIUMPH OF CRIME.
A monster assassin! Has he been brought before the bar of his country, tried and condemned to the penalty of death, such as in the days of his power he meted out to hundreds of thousands of innocents? Has he been cast into a loathsome prison, such as the many in which thousands of his victims have rotted and died? Nay! not so! it is not so decreed in Turkey. ”

“ We are not wild and lawless descendants of Jenghis Khan and Tamerlane: we are peace-loving, law-abiding citizens, lovers of language and literature, of the arts and sciences, energetic traders, hardworking tillers of the soil, industrious artizans and labourers, producing in ourselves all the elements that constitute the society and well-being of civilized man; and as the oldest Christians, we ask of Christian nations, if we are to be trodden out? ”

“ Hitherto the Powers of Europe have by their jealousies and rivalries cultivated these evil influences, they have watered them and made them grow, but when their culminating point is reached, they must re-act on Christendom and the natural consequence must follow. Those who sow the wind, must reap the whirlwind. It is in the natural order of things.
I will allow that Liberty, Justice, Equality, Fraternity are the watchwords of Young Turkey, but Young Turkey is only a small minority; the great majority of the Turkish nation are not Young Turks. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But there is a counter picture of horrors in which also there has been a sacrifice of human bullets, made not only of men but of women and children, human bullets, not of soldiers, themselves fortified and equipped with instruments of slaughter for fighting and grappling with the foe, but human bullets of unarmed men, of helpless women and children, of youth and old age, caught like rats in a rat-trap; and these human bullets have been sacrificed to the savage lusts of murder and plunder of the world’s fiercest oppressors, and to the political and commercial interests of civilized nations. ”

“ Let us ask the question, Who and what are these Turks, whom Europe for her own sordid ends has petted and pampered and helped and supported? and the answer comes with striking force to-day over the lapse of a century, in the words of one of England’s greatest sons: “I have never before heard that the Turkish Empire has been considered any part of the balance of Powers in Europe. They despise and contemn all Christian princes as infidels, and only wish to subdue and exterminate them and their people. ”

“ Generous and kind hearted people who open your purse strings; would to God I entreat, ye would raise up your voices and demand that this hideous slaughter and oppression of a helpless christian race should cease. Would to God I entreat, ye would raise up your voices and demand that this people of an industrious, intelligent christian race, robust in mind and body, should be let to live. ”

“ Are the balance of our women to be subjected to agonies so hideous and revolting that death at the fiery stake or on the iron rack were mercy and bliss? Are the balance of our babes and children to be exterminated like vermin? Are the balance of our people, the industrious, intelligent, clean, self-respecting element in the Turkish Empire, to be yet again hunted like wild beasts and killed like rats and flies? ”

“ 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. ”

“ While we fill our stomachs with choice morsels, while we rest selfishly in our comfortable beds, these fatherless and brotherless orphans, widows hungry, naked, and barefoot wander hither and thither, and thousands of families are fleeing from the fatherland. We are convinced that the government is doing its work, but what has happened is so great a calamity that it can keep a government busy for years. However much sacrifice we may make, still it will be inadequate, because the happiness of the fatherland depends on healing such blood wounds as these as soon as possible. ”

“ 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.
[42]
THE ARMENIAN MASSACRES AND CIVILIZED EUROPE. ”

“ On the Russian side of the frontier the Armenian villages were too scattered, too much interspersed with Georgians and Tartars, to allow of autonomy. On the Turkish side, he thought, massacre and exile had now left too few of the race to form any kind of community. Indeed, for the last twelve years the Armenian villagers have been crawling over the foot of Ararat by thousands a year to escape the Kurds, and every morning they come and stand in fresh groups of pink and blue rags outside the monastery door where the head of their Church and race lies dying. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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 [38] 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. ”

“ The human mind is staggered and asks itself the question if even the imaginations of fiends and devils could originate such horrors. Then this orgy of the human fiends is arrested. For the time being the appetite for blood, lust, and plunder is satisfied; for the time being, the eye is content with the scenes of havoc and desolation lying under the sun; the [10] smell of corpses is in the air, the odor from the carcases of the “christian swine” reek in the nostrils of the Turk, he turns away, his jaws dripping with blood, and rests to couch for a future spring. ”

“ What have these worse than savages to do with the Powers of Europe but to spread war, destruction, and pestilence among them? The Ministers and the policy which shall give these people any weight in Europe will deserve all the bans and curses of posterity.” [14]
To-day the Powers of Europe are armed to the teeth. To-day they are groaning under the burden of armaments which they are increasing with breathless speed although the burden grows heavier. To-day all Europe is trembling lest the hell-hounds of war be let loose. ”

“ The Czar Liberator stands out in history as that noble figure—a benefactor of mankind. Through his humanitarian susceptibilities, and his sublime efforts for their deliverance, the Christians of European Turkey received immunity from Turkish slaughter; and the protection of his benevolent arm was extended over that unhappy Christian nation of Asiatic Turkey, the Armenians; at least it would have secured them immunity from the record-breaking slaughter that followed, but the Power that had stood behind Turkey since 1791 frustrated his endeavours. ”

“ In a subject people they are Crimes.
After I had laid this bitter Truth to heart, I did not have to seek for the Why and Wherefore of the Armenian Massacres.
The Armenian Massacres stand without their parallel in history. The human mind staggers to contemplate the fiendish orgies of which they have been the victims, and no pen can describe their horrors: and this helpless christian people are to-day in the same deadly peril as they have been since the famous Treaty of Berlin consigned them bound hand and foot to the mercy of their executioners. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For thirty-one years the great European Powers kept up by joint action an infamous peace, and out of regard for their own selfish interests allowed a corrupt, vicious, gangrened and blood-thirsty power to wreak its hellish atrocities not only on the men, but on the women and children of a helpless nation. ”

“ James Bryce, in his supplementary chapter to the 4th edition of his book “Transcaucasia and Ararat” makes the following grave comment:—
“Twenty years is a short space in the life of a nation. But these twenty years have been filled with sufferings for the Armenian Christians greater than their ancestors had to endure during the eight centuries that have passed since the first Turkish Conquest of Armenia. They have been years of misery, slaughter, martyrdom, agony, despair.” ”