March 4, 1919

Even before the Conference assembled, the Armenian delegates, official and otherwise, were on hand. Perhaps today I should review their activities as far as they are known to me. They hail Mr. Wilson as their liberator after twenty-four centuries of slavery; and as one of them told me, the Fourteen Points, their charter of liberty, they regard as Holy Writ. “Your Wilson came from Washington,” said Aharonian, chairman of the delegation, “but he was sent by God.”

They have had their day before the Council of Ten (on February 26), and Lord Bryce is working for them day and night. My sympathy has been with them from the beginning, and I have been as helpful as I could be with propriety. (How silly that sounds, and yet it is the simple truth.) I do not have to read the atrocity stories which Lord Bryce has filed with us because with my own eyes during my days in Turkey I saw things that were even more bloodcurdling. I do not close my eyes to the crimes which the Armenians have since committed in the way of retaliation from time to time when the rare occasion presented against the diabolical Kurds and the Turkish irregulars—the Bashi-Bazouks. Indeed, I approve of them.

One, and I sometimes think not the least, of the handicaps of this unfortunate people is that in their church allegiance they are divided. Many of them are Gregorians, some are Roman Catholics, and not a few are Protestants. There is even a group of Nestorians. The result is, absurd as it seems, the Armenians do not benefit by the zealous and undivided support of any of the great churches. How strong are these sectarian animosities was brought home to me during my stay in Jerusalem. The political and social life of the “holy” city is poisoned by it. If there had been any other halfway decent place for me to lodge, I would have left the Greek Hospice and the stern control of Brother Stephanos, who kept such a watchful eye upon me. He deplored my relations with the Abyssinians, although he knew what very definite obligations their pilgrims had placed me under. Brother Stephanos admitted that the Armenians belonged to the Christian tribes, but yet as schismatics they were beyond the pale. In the Holy City, how these Christians do not love each other!