THE MIRACLE
A True Story |
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rayahs, or Greek Ottoman subjects, were forcibly taken for military service and
set to digging trenches and other work in the rain, without blankets or
tents or food, and three out of four of them died. The families will be
brought away, wives and sisters and children will be without natural
protectors, and must perish unless indefinitely cared for.
It will be the theory of some that no relief work should be done in
Greece and that the brunt of feeding all the refugees brought there
should be borne by that country as she was responsible for the great
debacle, but the funds of Greece are exhausted and she is unequal to
this task, and I do not know why innocent third parties should be made
to suffer for the faults of others.
I wish to repeat that the consistent policy of the Turk, since the fall of
Abdul Hamid, has been the expulsion, killing and elimination of the
Christian races. I have made several successful prophecies and I now
make another: if the Kemalist forces are allowed to enter Constantinople,
the awful scenes which we have witnessed in Smyrna will be repeated
in that city. In view of all that I have said and of all that has happened, I
see no reason why the Turks should massacre Armenians and Greeks,
in the Pontus, in Armenia and Asia Minor, and give them a "kindly and
benevolent reign" in Constantinople.
I wish now to point out the difference between the Greeks and the
Turk. The Greeks have undoubtedly massacred Turks, but no nation
has such a consistent history of massacres on a great scale or ever
had in the world's history as the Turks. Greek politics are corrupt and
vicious but the Greek is capable of civilization along modern lines; he
builds hospitals, universities, founds steamship lines, introduces
modern agriculture and given liberty, he develops. I see a difference
between the excesses of a furious and betrayed army, retreating through
a country which it had held for several years and without its officers,
and the conduct of the victorious Turkish army which, instead of
protecting the helpless people which it had in its power, deliberately
set about massacring and outraging it.
No one who has not lived in the Near East can understand how utterly
incapable of progress the Turk is. No one, who has not travelled through
the Turkish villages or through the back region of the Turkish empire,
can understand how hopelessly unprogressive a people is, who, holding
for nearly five hundred years the fairest and richest part of the earth's
surface, has never made a sewing machine nor a plough, nor a steam
engine, nor a battleship, nor a cotton gin, nor a pin, nor a match. Anyone
who hopes for the progress of Turkey inhabited only by Turks is hoping
for the leopard to change its spots. The Mussulman religion, which is
now having a great renaissance throughout the world, with its polygamy,
its attitude toward women and to all non-Mussulman races, and the
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