policy of neglect there was substituted a policy of murder. The state no
longer considered itself secure when in various parts of its dominions
its subjects showed themselves progressive and industrious. They had to
be kept down, and clearly the most efficient way of keeping people down
was killing them. Let it not be supposed for a moment that either the
first massacre, or any that followed, was the result of local
disturbances and fanaticism. It was nothing of the sort: each was
arranged and planned at Constantinople, as the official means, invented
by the arch-butcher, Abdul Hamid, of maintaining in power the most
devilish despotism that has ever disgraced the world. Something had to
be done to prevent the alien tribes in Asia slipping out of the noose of
Ottoman strangulation, even as the European tribes had done, and
forming themselves into separate and independent states. A ruler with
progressive ideas, one who had any perception of the internal prosperity
which alone can render an empire stable, would have made the attempt to
weld his loose and wavering domination together by encouraging and
working for the prosperity of its component peoples, so that he might,
though late in the day, give birth to a Turkey that was strong, because
its citizens were prosperous and content. Not so did Abdul Hamid; the
Turkey that he sought to establish was merely to be strong because he
had battered into a blood-stained pulp the most progressive and the most
industrious of the alien peoples over whom he ruled.

It is significant that, while yet the blood of the murdered Christians
was scarcely washed from the streets of Constantinople, the Emperor
Wilhelm II. visited his brother-sovereign at Yildiz, after making his
tour throughout the Holy Land. The two can hardly, in their intimate
conversations, have completely avoided the subject of the massacres; but
after all, that was not such an unmanageably awkward topic, for Wilhelm
II. could tactfully have reminded Abdul Hamid that his own throne also