There are also weak nations so utterly
incompetent either to protect the rights of foreigners against their own
citizens, or to protect their own citizens against foreigners, that it
becomes a matter of sheer duty for some outside power to interfere in
connection with them. As yet in neither case is there any efficient
method of getting international action; and if joint action by several
powers is secured, the result is usually considerably worse than if only
one Power interfered. The worst infamies of modern times--such affairs
as the massacres of the Armenians by the Turks, for instance--have been
perpetrated in a time of nominally profound international peace, when
there has been a concert of big Powers to prevent the breaking of this
peace, although only by breaking it could the outrages be stopped. Be it
remembered that the peoples who suffered by these hideous massacres,
who saw their women violated and their children tortured, were actually
enjoying all the benefits of "disarmament." Otherwise they would not
have been massacred; for if the Jews in Russia and the Armenians in
Turkey had been armed, and had been efficient in the use of their arms,
no mob would have meddled with them.
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