Page:Ambassador Morgenthau's Story.djvu/433

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
AMBASSADOR MORGENTHAU'S STORY
367

desert. This was an essential detail in the achievement of the great new German Empire, extending from Hamburg to the Persian Gulf. But this railroad could never succeed unless there should develop a thrifty and industrious population to feed it. The lazy Turk would never become such a colonist. But the Armenian was made of just the kind of stuff which this enterprise needed. It was entirely in accordance with the German conception of statesmanship to seize these people in the lands where they had lived for ages and transport them violently to this dreary, hot desert. The mere fact that they had always lived in a temperate climate would furnish no impediment in Pan-German eyes. I found that Germany had been sowing those ideas broadcast for several years; I even found that German savants had been lecturing on this subject in the East. "I remember attending a lecture by a well-known German professor," an Armenian tells me. "His main point was that throughout their history the Turks had made a great mistake in being too merciful toward the non-Turkish population. The only way to insure the prosperity of the empire, according to this speaker, was to act without any sentimentality toward all the subject nationalities and races in Turkey who did not fall in with the plans of the Turks."

The Pan-Germanists are on record in the matter of Armenia. I shall content myself with quoting the words of the author of " Mittel-Europa," Friedrich Naumann, perhaps the ablest propagator of PanGerman ideas. In his work on Asia, Naumann, who started life as a Christian clergyman, deals in considerable detail with the Armenian massacres of 1895-96. I need only quote a few passages to show the