The special correspondent employed by Renter's Agency to inquire into
the Armenian atrocities, reports from Tiflis that they actually occurred. Some Armenian peasants in Sassoon, he says, were fighting Kurds in self-defence, when orders arrived from Constantinople to "punish them to the utmost extremity." The Turkish soldiers were let loose, and they murdered the whole Armenian population with circumstances of unspeakable atrocity, the total of those massacred being estimated by their friends at ten thousand, and by impartial evidence at from one thousand to three thousand. The reporter, however, adds that the Armenians also commit atrocities on Turkish soldiers and women, their object being to stir the Turks to reprisals which shall create horror and indignation throughout Europe. They even attempted to murder two American missionaries, in order that the Government of Washington might demand satis- faction from the Sultan. That revolutionary plots are laid in Armenia, we can well believe, and even that Turks are murdered with horrid cruelty ; but the statement that these things are ordered to provoke reprisals, taxes Western credulity. How could any plotters, however astute, know that because Turks had been tortured, say, in Bitlis, therefore poor peasants would be massacred in Sassoon The Armenians may be no more merciful than other Asiatics, though they have hitherto had no character for cruelty, but they do not deliberately hand over their own countrymen to torture, in order that Consuls who might never hear of Turkish vengeance, should be provoked to send home reports.
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