think, we may see traces of the Prussian instinct for tabulation, for
classification, for category-mongering. Enver and his colleagues lost
patience with these dilatory tactics. The Armenians of the province of
Brussa were deported wholesale, and long before the registration lists
of Constantinople were finished, all Armenians were moved out of the
town. Ten thousand males were massacred in the mountains of Ismid, and
the Armenian women and children taken into collecting stations for
deportation to 'agricultural colonies' (so the phrase ran in the
Pecksniff language of Prussia) situated in the Anatolian desert, in the
desert of Arabia, and in malarious marshes on the Euphrates. With this
clearing out of Armenians from Thrace, from Constantinople, and from
Armenia itself, we have finished with our first class of the Armenian
atrocities. For it reasons were at least invented by German apologists.
Military necessities, which here, as in Belgium, knew no law, dictated
it; the frightfulness involved was incidental to War. But such
considerations were not even alleged for the second class of the
murder-scheme. Before passing on, it will be well to review, quite
shortly, the reasons which dictated it, and penetrate into the infernal
councils of Enver Pasha and Talaat Bey.

The text of the scheme is to be found in the defined policy of the
Young Turk party as set forth in their Congress of 1911. 'Turkey must
become a really Mohammedan country, and Moslem ideas and Moslem
influence must be preponderant.... Sooner or later the complete
Ottomanisation of all Turkish subjects must be effected: it is clear,
however, that this can never be attained by persuasion, but that we must
resort to armed force.'

There is the text that was expanded into the discourse of murder; it is
the definition of a policy. Within a few years there followed the
European War, and that probably was the immediate cause of its being put
into effect. No more admirable opportunity for Ottomanisation could
present itself, for the entry of Turkey into the war was most unpopular
with the bulk of the Turkish population, and it was advisable to bribe
them into acceptance of it. The bribe was the houses, the property, the
money and the trade that throughout the length and breadth of Turkey was
in Armenian hands. For the Armenians were by far the wealthiest of the
alien populations, and some 90 per cent. of Turkish trade passed through
their shops and offices. Here,