IN
THE list of massacres antedating the colossal crimes which have come under my
own personal observation, is cited the killing of 14,700 Bulgarians in 1876.
This butchery of a comparatively few—from a Turkish view-point—Bulgarians, some
fifty years ago, provoked a splendid cry of indignation from Gladstone. As this
narrative develops and reaches the dark days of 1915 to 1922,
during which period whole nations were wiped out by
the ax, the club and the knife, and the Turk at last found the opportunity to
give full vent to his evil passions, it
will appear that no similarly effective protest has issued from the lips of
any European or American statesman.
The
curious feature is that, owing to the propaganda carried on by the hunters of
certain concessions, an anti-Christian and pro-Turk school has sprung up in the
United States.
In
“A Short History of the Near East”, Professor William Stearns Davis, of the
University of Minnesota, referring to the Bulgarian atrocities 1876,
says:
“What
followed seems a massacre on a small scale compared with the slaughter of
Armenians in 1915-16, but it was enough to paralyze the power of Disraeli to
protect the Turks. In all, about twelve thousand Christians seem to have been
massacred. At the thriving town of Batal five thousand out of seven thousand
inhabitants seem to have perished. Of course neither age or sex was spared and
lust and perfidy were added to other acts of devilishness. It is a pitiful
commentary on a phase of British politics that Disraeli and his fellow Tories
tried their best to minimize the reports of these atrocities. They were not
given to the world by official consular reports, but by private English
journalists.”
The
above is interesting, as it illustrates a quite common method of government
procedure in such cases. The Tory does not seem to be a unique product of
British politics.
While
I was in Europe recently, I talked with a gentleman who was in the diplomatic
service of one of the Great Powers and was with me in Smyrna at the time that
city was burned by the Turkish army. This gentleman was in complete accord with
me in all details as to that affair, and asserted that his Foreign Office had
warned him to keep silent as to the real facts at Smyrna, but that he had
written a full memorandum on the subject, which be hopes to publish.
It
is significant that the Turks in 1876 were championed by Jews, while to-day such
Jews as Henry Morgenthau, Max Nordau and Rabbi Wise are prominent among that
group of men who are raising their voices in behalf of oppressed
Christians.
It is due to their influence, and to the voices of such senators as King of Utah
and Swanson of Virginia, that confirmation of the Lausanne Treaty has been
deferred until the blood on the bayonets and axes of the Turks should get a
little drier.
Speaking
of Disraeli, Gladstone wrote to the Duke of Argyle: “He is not such a Turk as I thought. What he hates is
Christian liberty and reconstruction.”
The
Bulgarian massacres were made known by an American consular official, and
denounced by Gladstone in a famous pamphlet. They led to the declaration of war
by Russia, the treaty of San Stefano and the beginning of the freedom of
Bulgaria.
In
a speech at Blackheath in 1876, Gladstone said:
“You
shall retain your titular sovereignty, your empire shall not be invaded, but
never again, as the years roll in their course, so far as it is in our power to
determine, never again shall the hand of violence be raised by you, never again
shall the flood gates of lust be opened to you.”
In
his famous pamphlet, Bulgarian Horrors
and the Question of the East, we have the following, a thousand times truer
to-day than when it was written:
“Let
the
Turks now carry away their abuses, in the only possible manner, namely, by
carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Blmhashis and
Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage,
shall, I hope, clear out from the province that they have desolated and
profaned. This thorough riddance, this most blessed deliverance, is the only
reparation we can make to those heaps and heaps of dead, the violated purity
alike of matron and of maiden and of child; to the civilization which has been
affronted and shamed; to the laws of God, or, if you like, of Allah; to the
moral sense of mankind at large. There is not a criminal in an European jail,
there is not a criminal in the South Sea Islands, whose indignation would not
rise and over-boil at the recital of that which has been done, which has too
late been examined, but which remains unavenged, which has left behind all the
foul and all the fierce passions which produced it and which may again spring up
in another murderous harvest from the soil soaked and reeking with blood and in
the air tainted with every imaginable deed of crime and shame. That such things
should be done once is a damning disgrace to the portion of our race which did
them; that the door should be left open to the ever so barely possible
repetition would spread that shame over the world.”
“We
may ransack the annals of the world, but I know not what research can furnish us
with so portentous an example of the fiendish misuse of the powers established
by God for the punishment of evil doers and the encouragement of them that do
well. No government ever has so sinned, none has proved itself so incorrigible
in sin, or which is the same, so impotent in
reformation”
The
time will never come when the words of Gladstone, one of the wisest of English
statesmen, will be considered unworthy of serious attention. The following
characterization of the Turk by him has been more aptly verified by the events
that have happened since his death than by those that occurred
before:
“Let
me endeavor, very briefly to sketch, in the rudest outline what the Turkish race
was and what it is. It is not a question of Mohammedanism simply, but of
Mohammedanism compounded with the peculiar character of a race. They are not the
mild Mohammedans of India, nor the chivalrous Saladins of Syria, nor the
cultured Moors of Spain. They were, upon the whole, from the black day when they
first entered Europe, the one great anti-human specimen of humanity. Wherever
they went a broad line of blood marked the track behind them, and, as far as
their dominion reached, civilization disappeared from view. They represented
everywhere government by force as opposed to government by law.—Yet a government
by force can not be maintained without the aid of an intellectual element.—
Hence there grew up, what has been rare in the history of the world, a kind of
tolerance in the midst of cruelty, tyranny and rapine. Much of Christian life
was contemptuously left alone and a race of Greeks was attracted to
Constantinople which has all along made up, in some degree, the deficiencies of
Turkish Islam in the element of mind!”
To
these words of Gladstone may appropriately be added the characterization of the
Turk by the famous Cardinal Newman:
“The
barbarian power, which has been for centuries seated in the very heart of the
Old World, which has in its brute clutch the most famous countries of classical
and religious antiquity and many of the most fruitful and beautiful regions of
the earth; and, which, having no history itself, is heir to the historical names
of Constantinople and Nicaea, Nicomedia and Caesarea, Jerusalem and Damascus,
Nineva and Babylon, Mecca and Bagdad, Antioch and Alexandria, ignorantly holding
in its possession one half of the history of the whole
world.”
In
another passage Newman describes the Turk as the “great anti-Christ among the
races of men.”
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