The Turk laughed and blamed the Armenian revolutionists. The Porte denied the outrages at first then charged the trouble to the Armenians, until the terrible situation at Trebizond and Erzeroum could no longer be kept from the knowledge of Christendom. The prisons in Trebizond were filled with wounded and helpless Armenians: the Mohammedans were well armed and the governor entirely in sympathy with, even if not the instigator of the outrages.
Meanwhile the European manager of the United Press at Constantinople gave the first detailed account of the appalling massacres to which Armenian Christians had been subjected since the Sultan Abdul Hamid gave perfidious assent to the reforms demanded by the European Powers. The harrowing and shameful facts were told on the authority of American Christian men, who witnessed them, and their narrative had the unqualified endorsement of Mr. Terrell, the United States Minister to Turkey. In view of such conclusive testimony to the duplicity and faithlessness of an incorrigible ruler, it seems incredible that Christian peoples will let their rescuing hands be stayed any longer by sordid jealousy and greed, or that they will any longer consent to bear a share of the responsibility for such crimes against humanity. The blood of the slaughtered thousands of their fellow Christians in Armenia cries against them from the ground.
By this trustworthy evidence the conclusion was justified that within the six provinces mainly concerned in the proposed reforms, no fewer than fifteen thousand Armenians were assassinated, while the number of those rendered homeless and robbed of all their possessions, did not fall short of two hundred thousand. The places and dates exposed the aim of the hellish atrocities committed, and drove home the guilt to their authors and accomplices. On October 20, the Sultan authorized Kiamil Pasha, his Grand Vizier, to accept the reforms proposed for the Armenian provinces by the European Powers, and to promise that they should be forthwith carried out. On the next day, October 21, when there had been ample time for the reception of orders telegraphed from Constantinople, the Kurds and Turks throughout Armenia, openly incited and assisted by the regular troops, entered on a scheme of wholesale murder and devastation. The purpose of this preconcerted iniquity, as disclosed by its disgraceful antecedents and its horrible results, was to vent upon the helpless Armenians the venom and the spite engendered by enforced submission to the will of the Christian Powers. It was to enforce at one vindictive stroke the programme of extermination devised in 1890, but prosecuted hitherto with some show of secrecy and caution. It was to make of Armenia a solitude, and then with satanic mockery, to offer exact fulfilment of the pledge of peace and of reform.