III
TO THE MURDERED PEOPLES
THE horrors that have taken place during the last two and a half years have given a rude spiritual shock to the western world. No one can ever forget the martyrdom of Belgium, Serbia, Poland, of all the unhappy lands of the west and of the east trampled by invaders. Yet these iniquitous deeds, by which we are revolted because we ourselves are the sufferers—for half a century or more, European civilisation has been doing them or allowing them to be done.
Who will ever know at what a price the Red Sultan has purchased from his mutes of the European press and European diplomacy their silence concerning the slaughter of two hundred thousand Armenians during the first massacres, those of 1894 to 1896? Who will voice the sufferings of the peoples delivered over to rapine during colonial enterprises? When a corner of the veil has been lifted, when in Damaraland or the Congo we have been given a glimpse of one of these fields of pain, who has been able to bear the sight without a shudder? What "civilised" man can think without a blush of the massacres of Manchuria and of the expedition to China in 1900 and 1901, when the German emperor held up Attila as an example to his soldiers, when the allied armies of the "civilised world" rivalled one another in acts of vandalism against a civilisation older and nobler than that of the west?[1] What help has the western world given to the persecuted races of eastern Europe, to the
- ↑ Cf. Victor Bérard's brief account of the Manchurian campaign in La révolte de l'Asie. Cf. also Les derniers jours de Pékin, where Pierre Loti describes the destruction of Tung-Chow, "the City of Celestial Purity."
