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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