It has long been conceded that a Mohammedan cannot govern believers in other religions with justice, but how far Abdul Hamid was actuated by fanaticism, how far he applied religious prejudices for political purposes, or whether lie was afraid that the Armenians would ultimately succeed in throwing off his yoke, are conjectures upon which students of Turkish affairs will never agree. He knew from the events of the past that he could never convert the Christian inhabitants of his empire to Islam by the sword, because the persecution which the Armenians had suffered for centuries only strengthened their faith, but no sultan since Selim the Inflexible ever did more to stimulate religious intolerance and encourage his Mussulman subjects to persecute his Christian subjects, than Abdul Hamid in Bulgaria and other parts of his empire as well as Armenia.
The Armenians who inhabit the northern part of Asia Minor along the southern coast of the Black Sea are a simple, quiet, primitive people of agricultural and pastoral pursuits. They live in small villages, and are devoted to their families and their religion. For centuries they have suffered from the depredations of the Kurds, migratory, half-civilized tribes who haunt the mountains during the summer but in winter come down to the plains and either quarter themselves upon the Armenian peasants or plunder them. Some villages pay regular blackmail, as the Scottish farmers used to do to protect themselves from troublesome Highland clans. Sometimes the Armenians defended themselves, but while they have not lacked courage, as their records show, very few had arms and those who did purchase guns and ammunition were in constant peril of arrest for conspiracy. Occasionally when they resisted the invasions of the Kurds, their villages were entirely destroyed and the inhabitants put to the sword, men, women, and children alike, with a ferocious brutality in which Turkish soldiers invariably joined with enthusiasm.
While a large majority of the Armenian population lived pastoral lives, caring nothing for the rest of the world, without any ideas of constitutional freedom or national independence, many of the young men drifted to the cities, where they prospered and became prominent and influential. They are thrifty and shrewd in trade. It is a common saying that it takes two Jews to cheat one Greek, and two Greeks to cheat one Armenian; but as a rule the members of that race have a high reputation for integrity as well as sagacity, and the late sultan, himself their bitterest enemy, trusted his finances to Armenians, as he trusted his life to Albanians in preference to Turks.
Gradually the mercantile affairs, the manufacturing, the banking, and other lines of business in the principal cities of Turkey have become absorbed by Armenians, Greeks, and Jews, for the Turk is no trader, and the Armenians are the most enterprising and successful of all.
There was no act of disloyalty until they recognized the significance of the persecution of their people at home. They accepted their long years of agony and despair as the penalty of their religion, but when American missionaries planted schools and colleges in Turkey and began to educate the young people, a new spirit of national pride and hope gradually developed. Thousands of Armenians, and among them some of the ablest leaders and most influential thinkers, received their first impulses and aspirations for civil and religious liberty at Robert College, an American institution on the Bosphorus, and in other colleges of the American Board of Foreign Missions in different parts of Asia Minor. This racial pride and spirit first found its expression in attempts to improve the intellectual condition of their own families, in the emancipation of their women, in a revival of the use of the Armenian language, which had been very largely superseded by the Turkish, and the enlightenment of the common people as to the rights and privileges to which all human beings are entitled.
Having the example of Bosnia and Bulgaria always in mind, the sultan undoubtedly suspected that the Armenians were preparing for a struggle for freedom and determined to check it by extermination if necessary. His intentions soon became known. When an Armenian was murdered or robbed, his assailant was rewarded, and the more Christians the Kurdish chiefs could kill the more rapid was their promotion. The prisons were filled with innocent men, the schools were closed, the Armenian language was forbidden, Armenian books were seized and burned, and American missionaries were prohibited from teaching anything that suggested freedom. Their text-books and newspapers were censored and suppressed if they were found to contain a sentence or even a word that could be construed to reflect upon political conditions. One newspaper was suppressed because it mentioned the dog star in a scientific article on astronomy.