Suffering Armenians.

New York Times 100 years ago today, May 21, 1913:
Lady Frederick Cavendish and Coadjutors Tell of Their Destitution.
To the Editor of The New York Times:
    May we appeal in your columns for a people who, during all their centuries of sorrow, have never suffered more than at this moment? I mean the Armenian Christian subjects of the Porte. The war between Turkey and the allied Balkan States has taken the husbands and fathers to fight against men whom they regard as brothers; they have died on Thracian battlefields, or have fallen victims to cholera, adding more widows and orphans to those already supported by charity. To purchase exemption from service costs £40, and these poor souls have not forty pence; those who possessed vehicles and cattle have been deprived of them for war purposes.
    The war with Italy ruined trade with the Mediterranean ports, locusts have destroyed the year's crops, and the people are still suffering from the effects of the awful Winter of 1910-11, when, in some parts of the empire, 95 per cent. of the cattle died and fruit trees were utterly destroyed. The price of provisions has gone up by leaps and bounds, and the condition of the people is a desperate one. The following is from a mission letter of Jan. 29:

    There is much distress all over Turkey owing to the effects of the war, and peace cannot come too soon. Men taken for soldiers, families left destitute, no man to bring the Winter wood or fodder for the stock or to earn money for food. The result for many cannot be other than pain, desolation, and death. In Caesarea weeping women and hungry children left to face the Winter in want and sorrow with no one to defend them. We hear dreadful stories of the sufferings in so many places, and it looks now (with all this snow) as though we were going to have a severe Winter. What must it be elsewhere? There will surely be dreadful suffering before Spring.

    From Broussa we learn that, in a neighboring village, "Five or six are dying daily from starvation." The missionaries plead with aching hearts for the means to take the little children, at least, from their miserable hovels, where they have no chance of education, or of spiritual development. We know that well-trained, well-educated, well-fed children are a country's best asset, and those already saved have rapidly developed physically, mentally, and morally, because of proper food, care, and training. They stand for the future Christian population of this country.
    Will not the wealthy and generous people of America listen to this tale of undeserved suffering, and help their own missionaries in the blessed work of relief?
    With full hearts we ask it. Gifts may be sent to Rev. Dr. Barton, the Board of Foreign Missions, Beacon Street, Boston, or to the "Friends of Armenia," 47 Victoria Street, London. S. W., England. They will be thankfully received and acknowledged. Yours faithfully.

LUCY C. F. CAVENDISH, President.
EDITH FRASER, Vice President.
E. W. BROOKS, Honorary Treasurer.
RADSTOCK, J. HEREFORD, BASIL WILBERFORCE, F. B. MEYER, RENDELL HARRIS, MARY HICKSON.