“But why prolong the sickening tale? There must be a God in heaven who will do right in all these matters, or some of us would lose faith. One or more consuls have been ordered that way to investigate the matter. If the Christians, instead of the Turks, reported these things in the city of Bitlis, and the region where I have been touring, the case would be different. But now we are compelled to believe it. “It seems safe to say that forty villages were totally destroyed, and it is probable that sixteen thousand at least were killed. The lowest estimate is ten thousand, and many put it much higher. This is allowing for more fugitives than it seems possible can have escaped.”[133] It is useless now, after twenty-three years, to add the testimony of the eye-witnesses and fugitives to show the barbarity of the soldiers and officers of the sultan, who had been inadvertently encouraged to go on in his career of assassination by the declaration of Her Majesty’s government that the imprisonments, tortures and massacres of the Armenians were not attributable to their religious faith. It appears from the following statement made by reliable persons that the sultan himself not only ordered the massacre, but he prepared an occasion for that deviltry. “To what extent Armenian agitation has provoked the terrible massacre it is difficult to determine. For a year or more there seems to have been an Armenian from Constantinople staying in the region as an agitator. For a long time he skilfully evaded his pursuers, but was at last caught and taken to Bitlis. He demanded to be taken to Constantinople and to the sultan, and it is said, he is now living at the Capital, receiving a large salary from the government. Evidently he has turned state’s evidence.” This mean creature, who ever he was, was an emissary of the Turkish government. He and his mission were not known to the officers at Bitlis. So he demanded that he should be taken to Constantinople, and to the sultan. There he was rewarded for the mischief that he was hired to do: he had paved the way for a great massacre. But by a most influential paper of Great Britain the crime at Sassoun was laid primarily at the door of England: