OUTLOOK MAGAZINE

TURKEY'S TREATMENT OF THE ARMENIANS

July 5, 1916
In Mr. Davenport's article in The Outlook on "President Wilson's Foreign Policy" our
Government is represented as saying, in regard to its treatment of the Armenians: "We did
all we could. We made protests. We got Germany to protest. . . . Of course, there is a
measure of excuse, not for the massacre, but for the policy of the Turkish Government,
which was to remove the Armenians from the immediate seat of war. Other countries
would have done the same thing, but in an entirely different way."
Did Germany protest? In a certain way and form, indeed; but why did her military
officers have an important part in directing the soldiers who did the business? Did our
Government know whom it was dealing with when it secured the "protest"?
Would "other countries" have taken away from their homes, where at best they could
obtain only a scanty subsistence, a hundred thousand families, non-combatants, with the
fewest exceptions, as innocent of offenses against the Government under which they were
living as a newly born child, consisting in large part of mothers with their little children,
and those who were soon to be mothers - would "other countries," the United States, for
example, have done this, even of done in the best way possible? It would have been
impossible to do such a thing without involving those "removed" in a great deal of
suffering, together with the certainty that they would be left without support, left to die,
after reaching any new home. Is any one innocent enough to suppose that a million of
people were removed from the "immediate seat of war" for their own safety? Would any
other nation, if it happened to be at war with Turkey, have adopted such a measure?
Although some Armenians, if opportunity offered, would have joined Turkey's foes
(justly indeed, though unwisely), was a whole nation of people to be taken out of their
homes, and thus left inevitably, for the most part, to perish, although this were done "in
an entirely different way"? The world has rarely before, if ever, looked upon a crime so
fiendish in its conception, so gigantic in its extent, so awful in its frightfulness and its
cruelty, so sure ultimately of fatal results, as this attempted blotting out of an entire
people whose ancestors had lived in the same quiet homes long before the Turks thought
of sizing them for themselves.
We, one of the largest and richest Christian nations in the world, having every comfort,
living largely at ease and in luxury, have for the space of a year looked with
commendable calmness upon this before unheard-of procedure, and "have done before
what we could." But has the world heard of so much as our officially spoken opinion of
it?
Norwich, Connecticut
John Otis Barrows