the spread of Western ideas, of education, and so on, the memory of their lost independence began to foment in them. The Turks were forced to give them certain charters of comparative freedom[1] which only whetted their appetite for more. So began plots and secret societies. One celebrated secret society, the Hintshak, was founded in Paris in 1887. Treasonable newspapers were printed abroad and smuggled into the country. The Turk has a wild terror of secret societies, plots and conspiracies. He knew, too, that Europe sympathized with the Armenians; he saw them becoming more and more rich and powerful. Then came the massacres. I do not propose to tell again the details of a story which is still fresh in everyone's memory. The point to remember is that it is not a case of a lawless mob attacking Armenians on their own initiative. No doubt the Kurds were quite ready to kill their neighbours; but in every case they were deliberately appointed to do so by the Government. The soldiers not only gave no protection, they helped to massacre. The signal for the beginning and end of the slaying, looting, burning was given from the barracks or the Koniah. The massacres were done in obedience to secret (not even very secret) orders from the Yildiz Kiöshk. Why 'Abd-ulHamid II organized these massacres is not easy to say. Perhaps it was merely to terrify and repress a people whose national consciousness was growing; perhaps in some characteristically tortuous way he hoped to provoke interference from Europe, and to gain something from it.[2] In any case, the blood of the Armenians remains the reddest stain on the hands of that bloody tyrant. In 1890 the massacres began at Erzerum. In 1893 there was another massacre and ghastly torturing. In 1894 there was a great massacre in the Sasun district. The chief massacre of all was from October to November 1895. This began in Trebizond, and spread throughout the Armenian lands. Between fifty thousand and one hundred
- ↑ The so-called "Armenian Constitution" of 1860, the Convention of 1878, etc. (Eliot: op. cit. 395-398).
- ↑ Sir Charles Eliot thinks that "the massacres seemed to aim at such a reduction of the Armenian population that it should be impossible to contend they were the predominating element in any district" (Turkey in Europe, p. 408). Deliberate massacres as a move in politics seem inconceivable to us; but then we are not Turks.
