At the International Congress of Berlin, for instance, a solemn pact was entered into by Turkey for the reform of the Armenian vilayets.  She carried out her promise by slaughtering every Armenian male, and outraging every Armenian woman who inhabited them.  The soi-disant protectorate of Crete was not a whit more successful in securing for the Cretans a tolerable existence, and the Allies had to bring it to an end twenty years ago, and free them from the execrable yoke; while finally the repudiation by Turkey of the Capitulations, which provided some sort of guarantee for the safety of foreign peoples in Turkey, has shown us, if further proof was needed, the value of covenants with the Osmanli.  It must be rendered impossible for Turkey to repeat such outrages:  the soil where her alien peoples dwell must be hers no more, and any Turkish aggression on that soil must be, ipso facto, an act of war against the European Power under the protection of whom such a province is placed.

The difficulty of this part of the problem is not so great as might at first appear.  We do not, when we come to look at it in detail, find such a conflict of interests as would seem to face us on a general view.  Even the precarious Balance of Power was not upset by a quantity of similar adjustments made by the Concert of Europe during the last hundred years.  The Powers freed Serbia, giving Turkey first a suzerainty over her, and finally abolishing that:  they freed Bulgaria, they freed Greece, Eastern Rumelia, Macedonia, Albania.  But, as by some strange lapse of humanity, they always regarded the subject peoples of Turkey in Asia as more peculiarly Turkish, as if at the Bosporus a new moral geography began, and massacre in Asia was comparatively venial as compared with massacre in Europe.  But now the Allies have said that there must be no more massacres in Asia, nor any possibility of them.  To secure this, it will be necessary to sever from Turkey the lands where the alien peoples dwell, and form autonymous provinces under the protectorate of one or other of the allied nations.  In most cases we shall find that there is a protecting Power more or less clearly indicated, whose sphere of interest is obviously concerned with one or other of these new and independent provinces.

The alien race which for the last thirty years has suffered the most atrociously from Turkish inhumanity is that of the Armenians, and it is fitting to begin our belated campaign of liberation with it.  If the reader will turn to the map at the end of this book, he will see that the district marked Armenia lies at the north-west corner of the old Ottoman Empire, and extends across its frontiers into Russian Trans-Caucasia.  That indicates the district which once was peopled by Armenians.  To-day, owing to the various Armenian massacres, the latest of which, described in another chapter, was by far the most appalling, such part of Armenia as lies in the Ottoman Empire is practically,