Note 140 — Chapter II · ORKHAN A NEW NATION IS FORMED AND COMES INTO CONTACT WITH THE WESTERN WORLD

I do not mean to assert that religious feeling has played no part in the massacres of our own day. But these massacres were arranged by the government, who incited the Moslems to attack their Christian neighbours, inflaming the ignorant mind more by an appeal to racial hatred, to loot, to lust, than to defence of the sacred faith. In the Armenian massacres it was represented to the ignorant village Moslem that the Armenians were plotting to set up an independent government or to betray the fatherland to some European power. I was in Adana during the terrible massacre of 1909, and make this statement from personal experience and observation.