The Murderous Tyranny of the Turks: The First Stage.

This maiming and warping of more gifted peoples is in itself a capital indictment of Turkish domination, but the wrong is made infinitely worse by the outrageous methods by which it has been carried out. These methods are justly described as a “murderous tyranny” in the Allies’ Response to President Wilson’s question.

There are three stages in the history of Ottoman tyranny, and the worst stage is the present. The Ottoman State has been a purely military State from beginning to end. Osman, its founder, from whom the Osmanli Turks take their name, was the hereditary chief of a wandering band of Turkish freebooters from Central Asia, whose father was licensed by Turkish Sultans already established in Asia Minor to carve out a principality for himself at the expense of the neighbouring Christians, just as the Teutonic knights carved out the principality of Prussia at the expense of the original native population. This Ottoman dominion, which started thus in the 13th century with a few square miles of territory in North-Western Asia Minor, expanded during the next three hundred years till it stretched from within a few miles of Vienna to Mecca and Baghdad. It destroyed the Ancient Empire of Constantinople, which had preserved Greek learning during the Middle Ages; the free Christian kingdoms of Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia, Wallachia, Moldavia and Hungary; and the independent Moslem states of Western Asia. Such a career of destructive conquest was a disaster to civilisation, and it was only made possible by a ruthless militarism.

The Ottoman method of conscription was to take a tribute of children from the conquered Christians—so many children from each family every so many years—bring them up in barracks as fanatical Moslems and train them as professional recruits. These “Janissaries,” militarised from their youth up and divorced from every human relation except loyalty to their war-lord, were the most formidable soldiers in Europe, and each new Christian land they conquered was a new field of recruitment for their corps. The Ottoman Empire literally drained its victims’ blood, and its history as a Vampire-State is unparalleled in the history of the world.