Dr. Dillon is an Englishman who was the special correspondent of the London "Daily Telegraph," a most accurate and conscientious reporter, who writes as an eye-witness:
"If a detailed description were possible of the horrors which our exclusive attention to our own mistaken interests let loose upon Turkish Armenians, there is not a man within the kingdom of Great Britain whose heart-strings would not be touched and thrilled by the gruesome stories of which it would be composed.
"During all those seventeen years, written law, traditional custom, the fundamental maxims of human and divine justice were suspended in favor of a Mohammedan saturnalia. The Christians, by whose toil and thrift the empire was held together, were despoiled, beggared, chained, beaten, and banished or butchered. First their movable wealth was seized, then their landed property was confiscated, next the absolute necessaries of life were wrested from them, and finally honor, liberty, and life were taken with as little ado as if these Christian men and women were wasps or mosquitoes. Thousands of Armenians were thrown into prison by governors like Tahsin Pasha and Bahri Pasha, and tortured and terrorized till they delivered up the savings of a lifetime, and the support of the helpless families, to ruffianly parasites. Whole villages were attacked in broad daylight by the Imperial Kurdish cavalry without pretext or warning, the male inhabitants turned adrift or killed, and their wives and daughters transformed into instruments to glut the foul lusts of these bestial murderers. In a few years the provinces were decimated, Aloghkerd, for instance, being almost entirely 'purged' of Armenians. Over 20,000 woe-stricken wretches, once healthy and well-to-do, fled to Russia or Persia in rags and misery, deformed, diseased, or dying; on the way they were seized over and over again by the soldiers of the Sultan, who deprived them of the little money they possessed, nay, of the clothes they were wearing, outraged the married women in the presence of their sons and daughters, deflowered the tender girls before the eyes of their mothers and brothers, and then drove them over the frontier to starve and die. Those who remained for a time behind were no better off. Kurdish brigands lifted the last cows and goats of the peasants, carried away their carpets and their valuables, raped their daughters and dishonored their wives. Turkish tax-gatherers followed these, gleaning what the brigands had left, and, lest anything should escape their avarice, bound the men, flogged them till their bodies were a bloody, mangled mass, cicatrized the wounds with red-hot ramrods, plucked out their beards hair by hair, tore the flesh from their limbs with pincers, and often, even then, dissatisfied with the financial results of their exertions, hung the men whom they had thus beggared and maltreated from the rafters of the room, and kept them there to witness with burning shame, impotent rage, and incipient madness, the dishonoring of their wives and the deflowering of their daughters, some of whom died miserably during the hellish outrage.