Page:Armenian poems, rendered into English verse (IA armenianpoemsren00blaciala).pdf/16

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viii
INTRODUCTION.

was such that it would have justified a revolution a thousand times over, if there had been any chance of success; but there was none. The Turks knew it; most of the Armenians knew it; and therefore the Patriarch of Constantinople and the representative Armenians in Turkey disapproved of the revolutionary propaganda that was carried on by some of the younger men, mainly in America and Europe. Only a handful of the Armenians in Turkey had anything to do with it. And this was made the pretext for giving the men of a whole nation over to slaughter, and the women to outrage and starvation!

It was no outburst of popular fanaticism, but a coldly premeditated crime, carried out by orders from Constantinople, ruthlessly and systematically, as a political measure. In the midst of the massacre, when a Red Cross nurse begged a high Turkish official to spare the children, his answer was, "Women have no business to meddle in politics!"

And what kind of people were thus given over to destruction? Dr. James L. Barton, secretary of the American Board of Foreign Missions, and former president of Euphrates College in Turkey, says: "I know the Armenians to be, by inheritance, religious, industrious and faithful. They are the Anglo-Saxons of Eastern Turkey. They are not inferior in mental ability to any race on earth. I say this after eight years' connection with Euphrates College, which has continually from 550 to 625 Armenians upon its list of students, and after superintending schools which have 1,000 more of them."