Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/106

 the Armenian minorities nearly a century ago, and began drawing out of the Gregorian Church a number of converts to Protestantism. These converts were so bitterly persecuted by the Gregorian clergy that the Sultan finally recognized them, some time in the 1850's, as a separate Prodesdan community in enjoyment of the right to worship as they pleased. Continued Gregorian persecution threw them increasingly into the arms of the missionaries who became a means by which Americans in the United States were drawn into touch with the new Prodesdan community in the Ottoman Empire. It was inevitable that this touch should bring the Armenians into contact with American civil as well as religious ideas, with the Western civilization which American Protestantism embodies, and that the very real and undoubted wrongs which the Armenians were suffering under Hamidian administration should become known in the United States. This was in itself an entirely healthy process, but its tragedy lay in the fact that the missionaries either could not or would not make it plain to their supporters in the United States that the Turks suffered from precisely the same wrongs. Thus instead of bringing all the races of the Empire impartially into the American vision, instead of making it plain in the United States that the Hamidian regime in Constantinople was the oppressor and that Turks and Armenians alike were its victims, the result of American missionary endeavor was to focus American concern on the Armenians' sufferings alone.

In the meantime, Russia had achieved a contact with the Armenians of a wholly different sort. Having broken through the barrier of the Caucasus