s of
maintaining the dominating strength of the Turkish element in the
kingdom not by the absorption of subject peoples, but by their
extermination. This in turn, this new and effective idea, served as a
first sketch of an artist with regard to his finished picture, and
starting with that the Nationalist party enlarged and elaborated it
into that masterpiece of massacre which they exhibited to the world in
the years 1915 and 1916 of the Christian Era, when from end to end of
the Empire there flashed the signal for the extermination of the
Armenian race. Abdul Hamid was but tentative and experimental as
compared to their systematised thoroughness, but then the Nationalist
party had learned thoroughness under the tutelage of its Prussian
masters. And in addition to instruction they had had the advantage of
seeing how Prussian firmness, with the soothing balm of Kultur to
follow, had dealt with the now-subject remnant of Belgians. That was the
way to treat subject people: 'the first care of a state is to protect
itself,' as Enver and Talaat could read in the text-books now translated
into Turkish, in copies, maybe, presented to them by their Master in
Berlin, and Turkey could best show the proof of her enlightenment and
regeneration, by following in the footsteps of Prussian Kultur. Perhaps
a few thousand innocent men might suffer the inconvenience of having
their nails torn out, of being bastinadoed to death, of being shot,
burned or hanged, perhaps a few thousand girls and women might die by
the wayside in being deported to 'agricultural colonies,' might fall
victims to the lusts of Turkish soldiers, or have babes torn from their
wombs, but these paltry individual pains signified nothing compared to
the national duty of 'suffering the state to run no risks.' As one of
this party of Union and Progress said, 'The innocent of to-day may be
the guilty of to-morrow,' and it was therefore wise to provide that for
innocent and guilty alike there should be no to-morrow at all. Years
before the statesmanship of Abdul Hamid had prophetically foreseen the
dawning of this day, when he remarked 'The way to get rid of the
Armenian question is to get rid of the Armenians,' and temporarily for
twenty years he did get rid of the Armenian question. But when, in 1915,
Talaat Bey completed his arrangements for a further contribution to the
solution of the same problem, he said, 'After this, there will be no
Armenian question for fifty years.