Armenia and its sorrows

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mad ? THE WORK OF EXTERMINATION 97
quainted with these prisons, and lias interviewed
scores of persons who have passed through them
" The stories they relate of their experience there are
gruesome, and would be hard to believe were they
not amply confirmed by the still more eerie tales told
by their broken spirits, their wasted bodies, and the
deep scars and monstrous deformities that will abide
with them till the grave or the vultures devour them.
There is something so forbiddingly fantastic and
wildly grotesque in the tortures and outrages invented
by their jailers or their local governors, that a simple,
unvarnished account of them sounds like the ravings
of a diseased devil. But this is a subject upon which
it is impossible to be explicit."
The most sickening horrors of the Inquisition, and
the infamous persecutions of a Nero or a Diocletian,
fade into insignificance beside the nameless outrages
and the fiendish cruelties which are now beingperpetrated
from day to day upon Christian men,
women, and children, by officials specially decorated
and honoured by the unscrupulous and perjured
despot who blasphemously calls himself, " The shadow
of God upon Earth." Can we wonder when we hear
that a weeping Armenian woman came to a missionary
and asked the question, " Has God gone
To sum up this chapter of horrors. At the commencement
of the present year (1896) a Committee
of Delegates of the six Embassies at Constantinople
drew up an official record of the outrages perpetrated
upon the Armenians during the latter half of 1895.
Omitting all statements which could not be proved
to be accurate, the report gives details of the massacre
of 25,000 Armenian Christians during those few
months, and estimates that if the massacres respecting
which there are no accurate figures were added to
these, a sum total of probably 30,000 would be
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