To speak in this fashion of the Armenians is more painful to me than I can express. From my youth I have sympathized with them in their great sufferings and, like most other people who depended on one-sided information, I attributed all their misfortunes to the much maligned and much calumniated Turks. Were the Armenians raided and maltreated by the lawless and murderous Kurds, who have been responsible for the greater part of the crimes which have been imputed to the Osmanlis? A sensational report was at once flashed over the world of a great massacre in Asia Minor perpetrated by the fanatical and fiendish Turk. Were they victims of Russian intrigue and aggression, driven from their homes and forcibly separated from their families? Again it was the Turk that was at the bottom of it all. Did they suffer reprisals for seditious outbreaks of plotting Huntchagists and revolutionary Armenians of foreign extraction? Still again the hue and cry was raised in Europe and America that the soulless Turk, always the Turk, only the Turk, was the guilty one. Armenian agitators, Armenian jacks-in-office, Armenian revolutionary committees provoking the Turks to retaliate on their offenders in order to force the intervention of the Great Powers[216]--these political mischief-makers go scot-free while the ever vilified Osmanli is pilloried before the world as a monster of iniquity and a demon incarnate. The Anatolian Halil Halid, who was born and bred in Asia Minor and who spent many years in England, commenting on the matters under consideration, pertinently asks, “Did the humanitarian British public know these things? No; it does not care to know anything which might be favorable to the Turks. Have the political journals of this country--Britain--mentioned the facts I have stated? Of course not, because--to speak plainly--they know that in the Armenian pie there were the fingers of some of their own politicians.”[217] And those that are well informed know the reason of Britain’s attitude toward Turkey, for they know that “since 1829, when the Greeks obtained their independence, England’s Near East policy has been remorselessly aimed at the demolition of the Turkish Empire and the destruction of Ottoman sovereignty.” Does France, the first nation of Europe to form an alliance with the sublime Porte, know these things? She does, but, at the present time, it suits her purpose to feign ignorance of them and to follow the policy of England in her dealings with those whom she has professed to be her friends and allies since the days of Francis I. With a volte-face worthy of a politician she does not even allow a favorite Academician, Pierre Loti--who knows the Turks better probably than any man in France--to make a statement in their favor, without censoring it, for fear he will reflect on the course of the present government.