Mark Twain in one of his entertaining books tells us that his travelling party was dirty at Constantinople, dirtier at Damascus, but dirtiest at Jerusalem.

Our party had already obtained the Jerusalemic stage of uncleanliness, and consequent ungodliness, a few days after leaving Erzeroum. We passed through close upon eight hundred miles of country sporadically inhabited by Armenians, still living, however poorly, in the midst of Circassians, Kurds, Arabs, Turcomans, and Turks. We saw them “alive” in their villages. We met them travelling alone along the high road without any escort or arms, the women now and then riding on horseback astride like men. We conversed with innumerable Armenians, priests and bishops of whole districts among the rest, and were assured by them that in such and such a district no outrages, no violence, no molestation whatsoever, even though revolutionists were about, had taken place. Lastly, our Armenian cook rode for hundreds of miles ahead of us quite alone, unarmed, and never encountered the slightest enmity, even far less than he might if he alighted as a stranger on horseback among the miners in some Christian community. And yet these Armenian agitators do not hesitate to assert that the Moslem Turk is bent on the extermination of their race. An even more untenable statement is that the Armenians are a “nation,” and as such are entitled to autonomy. The Armenians are not a nation, but an Asiatic race among many other races forming remnants of independent states in olden times. If half, or perhaps three-quarters of a million of Asiatic Armenians, now sporadically distributed over an area half the size of Europe, form a nation, what are we to say of the five million Russian Jews cooped up within the pale assigned to them by the Russian Government? Why does not Europe take up their case? What answer would Europe get from Holy Russia if she did so? But this does not exhaust the question. The ethical sentiment of Europe, rightly or wrongly, but in every case armed with enormous power, steps in and says: “Even if these facts are admitted, they do not excuse, much less justify, Turkey in using the means she adopted to crush a rebellion in our enlightened Christian age.” Here the Armenians undoubtedly have a very real grievance, which Turkey must see to at once unless her rule is to pass from her in Asia as well as in Europe. But the task will not be an easy one. We need only put ourselves in her place in order to realize its difficulties.

Here is a vast Mohammedan country, the Sovereign of which is acknowledged by international law to be the Sultan of Turkey. This country belonged to the Turks even before the discovery of America. To-day it is honeycombed with Christian, mostly Protestant, missionary schools, the avowed object of which is to educate a small Christian minority—be it admitted the most thrifty, shrewd, pushing, and intriguing of all Eastern races—in the Christian religion and at the same time in modern European ideas, and to bid them look to the Western world outside Turkey as their natural protector. This was bound to make these Asiatics discontented with their Asiatic status. It is denied that proselytism in any form was attempted or intended. I was informed by an American missionary at Bitlis, who had lived thirty years in Turkey, that formerly there was only one small Protestant Armenian sect in the whole of Armenia, and this was in the little town of Hunuesch, between Erzeroum and Bitlis. Yet statistics show that the pupils of the 621 Protestant schools distributed throughout Asiatic Turkey in 1896 numbered 27,000. Thus, whether proselytism has been intended or attempted, or not, it has, de facto, taken place on a large scale, for the existence of 27,000 Protestants, school pupils constantly renewed with each succeeding generation, out of a total Armenian population of half to three-quarters of a million (say a million if you will),^[9] represents a preponderant percentage of Protestants among them. These are not views, but facts, which can be easily verified, and with regard to which the reader may draw his own conclusions.

I met missionaries everywhere in Turkey. I was in their houses as far west as Macedonia, and as far east as Bitlis, near Lake Van, on the frontier of Persia. They nearly all evinced a marked anxiety not to be held responsible, however remotely or indirectly, for the revolutionary movement in Turkey, which in its turn was the source of the massacres that took place, and I willingly believe that they never really intended to provoke disturbance or encourage rebellion against the Turkish authorities. Still there cannot be any doubt that their teaching—not their doctrines, perhaps—had the result, probably never intended, and one it has taken a couple of generations to attain, of fostering the Armenian revolutionary movement throughout Asiatic Turkey. Everything had been carefully prepared in Asia and in the Press of Europe and America before the Armenian outbreak to boom a second Bulgaria. The project failed because, as compared with the years 1876–77, Liberalism as an aggressively agitating force happened to be under an eclipse in Europe in 1895–96. Asiatic Turkey is honeycombed with European and United States Consuls. These gentlemen occupy a quasi-diplomatic status, although in some places there are next to no national interests to be protected.^[10] Their dragomans and servants are mostly Armenians. When these Consuls walk abroad, accompanied by their armed bodyguard, it is as superior beings, as petty Ambassadors. They are entitled to address the Turkish Governor-Generals with almost Ambassadorial authority. They report the outcome of their investigations to their Ambassador at Constantinople, who thereupon proceeds to examine and cross-examine the Turkish Government at the Sublime Porte on the basis of the Consul’s communications. This activity was at work long before the outbreak of the Armenian massacres, and yet there are still people who are surprised if the Turks do not seem to love the Christians. Imagine the great towns in England, or the United States, or France, or Germany favoured by the presence of Moslem Consuls walking abroad like Ambassadors, with extra-territorial immunities, present in every law court, and reporting every petty larceny that takes place to their Ambassador! What would be the feelings in the above Christian countries towards these Moslem Consuls?

The English Vice-Consul at Bitlis read us some extracts from his latest report to Constantinople. They consisted of a number of incidents of petty wrongs regarding internal administration in Turkey—arbitrary enforcement of local dues, petty larceny among Turks or what not—matters mostly reported to him by his Armenian dragoman.

“But are not these purely internal local concerns?” I queried.

“Yes, to be sure,” was the reply.

“Well,” I rejoined, “if you are hereafter appointed to a Consular post in Russia, and you make similar reports to the British Ambassador at St. Petersburg, and the Russians find it out, don’t you think you would run a fair chance of the Russians making your official position rather uncomfortable for you?”

“I fancy I should,” was his jocular reply.

Incidents such as this show the vexations which the Turks have had to put up with in their own country at the hands of the Christians. Some time ago an English Consular official in Persia wrote an article on Persian administration in an English magazine, with the result that the Shah of Persia successfully insisted that he should not return to Teheran.

To these petty vexations must be added the more serious trouble Turkey has constantly to reckon with in consequence of the peculiar attitude of the Russian Government in regard to the Armenian revolutionary movement. We have been witnesses in our time of the vast resources of the Russian Government when called upon to deal with their own revolutionary parties. If the Russian Armenians would like to put them to the test they need only try to force the Russian Government to cease interfering with their schools, their language, and their creed. They might then indeed discover for themselves what a Russian millstone is like. But no!—they submit to Russian tyranny, preferring to organize revolutionary work at Kars, Tiflis, and Batoum directed against Turkey; and “helpless” Russian bureaucracy avows its inability to discover, much less to interfere with such!

The problem to be faced by Turkey is to ensure that security of life and property in her Asiatic dominions which is a sine qua non with every Government, be it under the Crescent or the Cross. The Kurds must be forced to give up their predatory propensities. They still defy the Valis, and are, I was credibly assured, now and then secretly encouraged in this by the military commanders, who intrigue against the civil authorities, and it is difficult for the Government in Constantinople to ascertain the true facts of the case. Shortly after our journey the Modiki Kurds slew the kaimakan of Modiki and along with him eight Turkish officers. They were still unpunished a year afterwards.^[11] And yet if such men cannot be brought to respect the law, and security for life and property be assured, it will shortly be said of Asiatic Turkey as it was of ancient Carthage: “Delenda est Carthago.” The Kurd, like Zola’s hero in “La DÉbÂcle,” must take to the plough and work. It is the law of the Universe; not even a Khalif can exonerate his subjects from its inexorable working. Turkey is in need of reforms—nor is she the only country in need of them. This is admitted on all hands. And among these none are so vitally necessary as those of an economic nature. It is a misfortune for Turkey to-day that Mohammed lived practically in a desert, where trees and roads were few and far between. If this great reformer had lived, for instance, in Anatolia or Mesopotamia, one of his earnest injunctions to his followers would doubtless have been that every one of the Faithful should consider it to be his duty to plant a tree and assist in making public roads, the latter being the occupation which Goethe tells us finally brought contentment to the restless soul of Faust. The Mohammedans, who after twelve hundred years still religiously obey every injunction of their Prophet, down to the number of prayers and ablutions to be said and practised per diem, would have naturally carried out his wishes in this particular. And, if so, Asiatic Turkey would wear a very different aspect from what it does to-day. Alas! those who have travelled through Turkey in Asia and witnessed the absolute lack of roads, bridges, and almost every other civilized convenience which marks a certain mean level of social organization, can only come to the conclusion that the Turk is more or less of a nomad: a nomad horseman, as he was a thousand years ago, leading the life of a nomad, even though his predatory instincts are now and then dormant, and, when exercised, are impartially put into practice at the expense of both the Mohammedan and the Christian.

The American mind is said to be able to find the shortest and straightest road from one given point—logical or material—to another. The Englishman may possibly come next to the American in this; the German is slower, but he is infallible in the long run, for he works a problem out stolidly with the assistance of logarithms and trigonometry. As you near the East, the capacity for discovering the short, straight, logical line decreases—the Austro-Hungarian finds it sometimes, the Turk hardly ever.

This constitutional inability to seize the value of an established fact or series of facts, and to draw the obvious logical conclusion therefrom, has all along hampered the Turk in putting his case before the world, even in instances where seven out of ten points were in his favour. I have heard an educated Turk cite the case of an Armenian tailor who had deserted his wife and run away with another woman as a proof of the iniquity of that interesting race. In his lack of logic the Turk recalls the Swiss woman who appealed to the court for a divorce from her husband. On being asked what grounds she could advance in support, she replied after thinking awhile: “He is not the father of my last child.”

Individual Americans, Englishmen, Germans—yes, even English missionaries—will now and then make out a better case for Turkey than all the Turks put together with whom I conversed during my several prolonged visits to Turkey.

“Yes, you must remember this question has two sides. There is a deal to be said for the Turks; the Armenians are not all angels,” an American missionary said to me in Anatolia. “For, let there be no mistake about it, it is only the Pharisee who bids us fancy that the priests of Baal have erected altars exclusively among the Turks.”

I contend that the responsibility for the horrors which took place in Asia Minor rested in the first instance with the Armenian revolutionists who instigated them, and not with the Turks, who are an Asiatic people like the Russians and the Persians, and whose methods of repression are not very different from theirs. The Armenian revolutionists were responsible for the suffering of the innocent for the guilty. I have read their pamphlets, their stirring circulars urging the helpless Armenian hamal (porter), peasant, and artisan to rise and throw off the Turkish yoke. These documents were only too often ruthless and indefensible in their unbridled lawlessness. The Armenian revolutionists stated that it was impossible to hope for anything but persecution on religious grounds from the Turk. Now the Armenian language, creed, and schools are perfectly free in Turkey, whereas they have always been persistently interfered with in Russia. The Armenians accuse the Turk of persecuting Christians, whereas the high road from Trebizond to Erzeroum, as already stated, is dotted with Christian monasteries and churches unmolested during centuries.

Our steamer stopped at Mersina, Rhodes, and Smyrna on our way, but we landed only at the last-named place. In strolling through the city, we took our farewell of Asiatic life with its caravans and its camels—a long line of which met us in the street. Our arrival at Constantinople took place after sunset, and in observance of some queer harbour regulations we were obliged to pass the night on board, being allowed to disembark only in the morning.

Before leaving for Paris we stayed a few days at Constantinople. The Sultan sent word asking me to draw up a report of the impressions gained on our journey. This I did, and expressed myself to the effect that what had made the deepest impression on us was the lack of roads, bridges, and trees, and the desolate nature of the whole country, some parts being little better than a wilderness. There would seem to be a great field for beneficent work in these lands.

Thereupon the Sultan expressed a wish that Dr. Hepworth and myself should come up to the Palace and be received by him. After duly considering the matter, we replied jointly that, as His Majesty had asked us to render a service to truth and justice by our investigations in his Asiatic dominions, we thought it best to leave Constantinople without seeing him; for, if we were received in audience, it would get known and might be construed into our having only acted as his agents—a surmise which would certainly discount the value of Dr. Hepworth’s impartial account of our experiences. The Sultan seemed to recognize the force of our contention, for he sent us a kindly message embodying his best wishes for our journey, and expressing the hope that we might some day come again to Constantinople. In order once for all to dispose of the idle rumours which were current at the time, I may add that neither Dr. Hepworth nor myself accepted any memento or present whatsoever from the Sultan. A decoration which His Majesty subsequently sent to Paris for Mrs. Hepworth was returned through the proprietor of the New York Herald.

Before leaving I received the following letter from Munir Pasha:

Palais ImpÉrial de Yildiz, Cabinet du Grand MaÎtre des CÉrÉmonies.

“Cher Monsieur Whitman,

“Je vous envoie par le porteur une lettre que j’ai Écrite À l’adresse de Monsieur Gordon Bennett, et qui est relative À votre rÉcent voyage en Anatolie.

“En vous priant de vouloir bien faire parvenir cette missive À sa destination, je me plais À vous dire combien je me fÉlicite des relations personnelles que j’ai eu l’honneur d’avoir avec vous, et À vous assurer du bon souvenir que je garderai de ces relations.

“Votre dÉvouÉ,

“Munir.”

Lundi, 12 Janvier 1898.

Most of us can recall the peculiar sensation we experience on returning into the fresh air from the fetid atmosphere of an ill-ventilated apartment, the noxious nature of which we had scarcely realized as long as we remained there. So also the true character of Eastern conditions only seemed to come home to us after we had left the country. At least, speaking for my travelling companion and myself, we only seemed to realize the treeless desolation, the wilderness of roadless Kurdistan, as we were passing through that beautiful, richly verdured section of Austria and South Germany traversed by the Orient Express. Then it was that the contrast enabled us to appreciate as perhaps never before the benefits of the high state of European land culture. The same feeling might well suggest itself to the traveller in passing from Dover to London through Kent, the Garden of England. On arrival in London, however, other features of Eastern life forced themselves on our memory and suggested comparisons less flattering to our own social conditions. Needless to say they were those which account for the strange fascination the East exercises even upon some of the most cultured European travellers.

Indeed, it was a strange, for the moment an almost unaccountable, sight to behold the crowds of people flocking into the City of a morning from the suburbs. This haste, this eagerness, as if their very life depended upon catching a train, constantly struck one as unnatural after living for weeks along the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates, staying in villages in which the conditions were so primitive—a contrast almost beyond comprehension. What could be the driving motive that impelled these people to this feverish activity, this restlessness? Why, hunger, to be sure, the grim necessities of the battle of life, a struggle to be continued without intermission from youth to the grave, and, when done, leaving little to take note of except, perhaps, that a mutton chop more or less would be called for at their particular luncheon haunt. And the background: Tooting Bec, Clapham, and Brixton in the South, Pentonville and Hackney in the North, and the East End with its miles of slums and its paupers; or to take those parts more familiar to middle-class life, Marylebone and Bloomsbury, with their interminable, dull, featureless roads and terraces, the rows of houses in their dread monotony, veritable soul-killing mausoleums of the living: what Buskin termed “streets in hell.” To think of their commonplace residents with their fads and fancies and their sympathies rigorously narrowed down in accordance with the tenets of their faith. All are supposed to worship the selfsame God, and yet they are socially divided, cut off from each other as nowhere people are in the East. Surely life should have some wider and nobler scope, aim, and application than the mere gratification of the appetite to live, were it only to cultivate that restful spirit without which any earnest self-communion, any deeper philosophy of life is an impossibility. At least so it seemed to strike one fresh from two months’ intimate communion with Nature—from conditions varying little, I should say, since Abraham’s time—a patriarchal state of things which acknowledges a chief, but gives brotherhood, if not equality, to the rest of the community. I had seen men in Syrian villages—the mayor, for instance, a stalwart, full-bearded peasant patriarch of dignified bearing and benevolent mien, in profile not unlike the stone images of the Assyrian kings in the British Museum—slowly rolling cigarettes with refined, beautifully shaped hands. Somehow it was a dignified memory, in spite of the backwardness of the country, lacking in all our scientific and sanitary improvements. I had not come across a single man with grimy hands, and, except in one Armenian village near Bitlis, I had not seen a woman or child in such rags as I often see in London. Much less had I heard of cases of starvation, nor was I told of forlorn, painted harlots or drunken women—surely items worth recording on the credit side against much that is to be deplored and commiserated with.

Some months after my return to London I received the following letter from the companion of my Armenian hardships:

“My dear Whitman,

“I was glad to see your familiar handwriting again, and almost thought I could hear your voice.

“Yes, my dear fellow, those were troublous, but still good, times; and now that I have largely forgotten the hardships, I should like to do something of the same kind again. I did get the letters you sent, and thanked you for sending them. Did my letter miscarry? I fear so, as you did not acknowledge the receipt or answer my questions. Did you say your article was in the April number of Harper’s? I have sent for it, and am sure that I shall have great pleasure in reading it.

“I worked hard at my book^[12] while in Paris, then went to Marseilles, to Nice and Mentone. The book is now nearly finished. It will cover about three hundred pages, possibly more, and will be published in September. I shall take pride in sending you a copy.

“My health is good. I am still a bit nervous, but that is because I have not yet rested as I ought to have done. The summer I guess will see me right again. You do not tell me about yourself. What are you doing? Where have you gone, or do you expect to go to Berlin^[13] as we thought? Moreover, do you expect to write a book? This is important, for it is sure to be a good one. You can do it, and you ought to.

“Please give my regards to your good wife, and believe me,

“Always yours,

“George H. Hepworth.”

Nearly seven years elapsed before circumstances took me back for a short visit to Constantinople. This time I went no longer as the representative of a great newspaper, but only as a private individual. All the greater was the surprise I felt on my arrival to find a warm welcome from the friends I had previously made there. From the Sultan and his entourage down to the kafedji, who used to hand me my cup of coffee in the Palace, and the swarthy arabadji, whose black stallions took me on my daily round of visits, they all seemed to bear one in kindly memory in gratitude for what they deemed were services rendered to their country, and this too, after a lapse of seven long years, in the Mohammedan East! This has often struck me as extraordinary in an age in which a lifetime of beneficent work, even when recognized at all, is forgotten in a week.

In the remaining chapters I have striven to reconstruct under different headings the impressions and experiences gained during my various visits to Turkey.