Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/110

 Ottoman Empire had thus far been generally peaceful. They both suffered alike under the Government at Constantinople and even when Westernism was alienating the Bulgarians in Europe, the Armenians in the eastern provinces were still "the loyal community." But the Armenian revolutionists in the West, instead of confining their work to Russian Trans-Caucasia, sought to raise funds in the Ottoman Empire as well, and the ancient Turco-Armenian relationship began to be poisoned. Armenian committees succeeded in giving the Turks the impression that "the loyal community" was no longer loyal, and Abdul Hamid replied in the savage massacres of 1894 and 1896. For this business the West rightly fastened the blame upon "Abdul the Damned," and the Turkish people whose patience sometimes reaches the proportions of a grievous handicap, were generally exempted from blame.

In 1907, the eastern provinces became the scene of an about-face in Anglo-Russian relations. Under the Anglo-Russian Treaty of that year, the two Powers effected an immediate partition of Persia and envisaged a future partition of the Ottoman Empire in which the eastern provinces would go to Russia and Mesopotamia would go to Great Britain. This would have admitted Russia to a military position whence it could have threatened both the Syrian corridor to Egypt and Mesopotamia itself, but presumably the British belief which prompted the 1907 Treaty was that, if Old Russia had made life well-nigh impossible for the British in Asia, Liberal Russia which was believed to have been born in the 1905 Revolution, would prove a neighbor with whom it was possible to live on