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For fifteen hundred years they have lived there in Armenia, a little island of Christians surrounded by backward peoples of hostile religion and

hostile race…Through all this period the Armenians have regarded themselves not as Asiatics, but as Europeans… As Abdul Hamid (sultan), in

1876, surveyed his shattered domain, he saw that its most dangerous spot was Armenia. He believed, rightly or wrongly, that these Armenians,

like the Rumanians, the Bulgarians, the Greeks, and the Serbians, aspired to restore their independent medieval nation, and he knew that Europe

and America sympathized with this ambition. The Treaty of Berlin, which had definitely ended the Turco-Russian War, contained an article which

gave the European Powers a protecting hand over the Armenians. How could the Sultan free himself permanently from this danger? An

enlightened administration, which would have transformed the Armenians into free men and made them safe in their lives and property and civil

and religious rights, would probably have made them peaceful and loyal subjects. But the Sultan could not rise to such a conception of

statesmanship as this. Instead, Abdul Hamid apparently thought that there was only one way of ridding Turkey of the Armenian problem---and

that was to rid her of the Armenians. The physical destruction of 2,000,000 men, women, and children by massacres, organized and directed by

the state, seemed to be the one sure way of forestalling the further disruption of the Turkish Empire.







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