It Is Certainly Confusing

There are many Americans disposed to discount the tales of horrors that come out of the Near East.

The Armenians have been pictured for years as the victims of Turkish butcheries; for years and years the collection plate has been passed around in the churches for their relief; and every once in a while some Armenian girl–always a good looking one–takes the platform under clever management and coins money out of tales of the suffering her people are alleged to have undergone at the hands of the unspeakable Turk.

And yet travelers, men and women of our acquaintance, come back from that eastern country with reports that the stories broadcasted about Armenian massacres are not so; that the Armenians are for the most part a lazy lot that can not be driven from their country by promise of better times elsewhere; that they are unreliable, and that they prey upon the Turks quite as much as Turks prey upon them.

In any event it is certainly confusing to anyone who reads the oft-repeated accounts of the sorrows of the downtrodden Armenians to read this statement from Rear Admiral Colby M. Chester, of the United States navy, in the September number of the Current History magazine:

The harem has vanished out of Turkey, and there are fewer men with plural wives then there are married men with mistresses in the United States.

There is more honesty to the square inch in Turkey than there is to the square year in most other countries of the world.

There are no prejudices against Christians in Turkey, let alone killing of Christians. Massacres of the past were enormously exaggerated by prejudiced writers and speakers.

Armenian massacres by the Turks have been almost entirely unknown since constitutional government was proclaimed in 1908. The wholesale deportations of 1915 were brought about by Turkish fear that Armenian agitators would get into trouble, * * * so the Armenians were moved from the inhospitable regions where they were not welcome and could not prosper, to the most delightful and fertile part of Syria. In due course of time the deportees, entirely massacred and fat and prosperous, returned, if they wished to do so.

There are few men in the American navy alive today with as fine a record as that of Rear Admiral Colby Mitchell Chester. It dates from the civil war, when he participated in the battle of Mobile Bay and the capture of Fort Morgan. He is known as a man of scientific trend, one careful in the use of words, whose work while in charge of hydrographic inspection in the coast survey service won him distinction; a commandant of navy yards, and once commander-in-chief of the south Atlantic squadron; and a man stationed for years in European waters, where he studied conditions in the Near East.

Now when such a man speaks as he does in a reputable magazine concerning the Turks and the Armenians, it is certainly hard for a newspaper reader to say where the truth lies in some of the stories that come out of the Near East.