Armenians Again in Peril of Turks Arm for Massacre

Dangers in Near East

With the Italians in southern Anatolia, the Greeks in Smyrna, the British and French in Syria and the Greeks clamoring for a large part of Thrace, the peace conference has fought shy on the the situation to a great extent since it gave the Turkish delegation a hearing and sent it home after learning how dangerous it would be to complicate near eastern problems with the other treaties.

Meantime, the british withdrawal from Armenia is threatening the entire Armenian population with massacre, and the Turks are showing increase hostility to the Italian troops in Southern Anatolia and to the Greek troops in the vicinity of Smyrna.  In fact all Asia Minor is in a state of ferment while the grand vizier in Constantinople is holding meetings with representatives of various allied commissions and endeavoring to raise funds to hold Turkey together pending an international decision as to her future.

“Just One Angle of the Meaning of U.S. Senate’s Delay in Ratification of Versailles Treaty of Peace

“There was another thing we wanted to do, that is done in this document (the peace of Versailles).  We wanted to see that helpless people were nowhere in the wolrd put at the mercy of unscrupulous enemies and masters.  There is one pitiful example which is in the hearts of all of us.  I mean the example of Armenia.  There was a Christian people, helpless, at the mercy of a Turkish government which thought it the service of God to destroy them.  And at this moment it is an open question whether the Armenian people will not, while we sit here and debate, be absolutely destroyed.  When I think of words piled on words, of debate following debate, when these unspeakable things that cannot be handled until the debate is over are happening in these pitiful parts of the world, I wonder that men do not wake up to the moral responsibility of what they are doing.

“Great peoples are driven out upon a desert where there is no food and can be none, and they are compelled to die and then men, women and children thrown into a common grave, so imperfectly covered up that here and there is a pitiful arm stretched out to heaven and there is no pity in the world.  When shall we wake to the moral responsibility of this great occasion?

“One of the glories of the great document which I brought back with me is this: That everywhere within the area of settlement covered by the political questions involved in that treaty, peoples of that sort have been given their freedom and guaranteed their freedom.

“To reject that treaty, to alter that treaty, is to impair one of the first characters of mankind.  And yet there are men who approach the question with passions, with private passion and party passion, who think only of some immediate advantage to themselves or to a group of their fellow countrymen, and who look at the thing with the jaundiced eyes of those who have some private purpose of their own.

“When at last, in the annals of mankind they are gibbetted they will regret that the gibbet is so high.