Letters from the scenes of the recent massacres in Armenia

284 Pages·11.989 MB·English

by  Harris J. Rendel, Harris Helen B.

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LETTERS FROM ARMENIA
Introductory Letter from
Mr. Gladstone.
Hawardeii Castle,
Chestet',
Jan. 14, iSgy.
»
Dear Mr. Rendel Harris,
I am very glad to hear that you
intend to publish a volume of your letters
on your experiences while distributing relief
and travelling through Armenia.
I am sure that it is of great importance
that all the information possible shoidd be
given on this subject, especially where it can
be given atfirst hand.
Yours
faithfully,
W. E. GLADSTONE.
LETTERS
FROM THE SCENES OF THE
RECENT MASSACRES IN
ARMENIA
BY
RENDEL HARRIS
J.
AND
HELEN HARRIS
B.
5Lanlioii
JAMES NISBET & LIMITED
CO.,
21 BEKNERS STREET
1897
Printedby Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.
At theBallaiUyne Press
PREFACE
The following letters consist of a correspondence carried
on by my wife and myself with a small circle of in-
terested friends in England who followed our expedition
to Armenia in the spring of the present year with every
form of sympathy, spiritual, moral, and material. As
often happens in such cases, the information which we
were able to send concerning the condition of affairs in
the interior of Asiatic Turkey was soon in demand by
others than those for whom it was initially designed ; and
when the channels which we had marked for our little
stream of testimony had once been overflowed, it was
not easy to refuse the request of a leading London firm
of publishers who wished to make our brook into a river
(with appropriate banks of copyright). And so, though
we had no intention in the first instance of allowing
general publicity to these letters, we have in the end
agreed that they may be reproduced.
One reason, which encourages us to believe that they
may be further helpful in the cause of the redemption
of the Eastern Christians from Turkish tyranny, lies in
the fact that they have already been the means of con-
vincing some thoughtful persons of the gravity of the
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PREFACE
vi
issues involved. And this lias been accomplished, as I
suppose, not by any extravagant tale of horrors, nor by
the recapitulation o£ stories of unnatural cruelty and
crime, but by the rude sketch which the letters furnish
of the Armenian national life and character as seen by
those who have taken time for the study, and who are
both sympathetic and critical in their attitude towards
these unfortunate people, so as not to underrate their
virtues, nor, on the other hand, to be blind to their
We
faults. were soon compelled to recognise that civi-
lisation in Armenia was making very rapid strides in-
deed, even in face of a tyranny which had assiduously
encompassed the destruction of "the whole forest of
civility," as Wordsworth calls it, and which in recent
repressive measures had "doomed it to perish, to the
last fair tree." But of a genuine civilisation it may be
said, as of a truly progressive religion (and theArmenians
have both), that the forces which are with us are more
than those that are against us.
The moderate tone of the letters was necessary, too,
in a country where correspondence was continually in
danger of being intercepted by the authorities but it
;
must not be assumed that we have told more than a
fraction of the misery which we have seen, or reported
more than a very small fraction of the horrors of which
we have heard.
Some trifling expansions have been made by means
of footnotes for the sake of persons who may not have
followed the story of Armenian undoing so closely as to
be familiar with all the historical matters alluded to.