Christian and professedly civilized nation, a large number of Albanian towns and villages were destroyed by fire or dynamite.  Though I have been unable to obtain any reliable figures, the consensus of opinion among the Albanians, the French and Italian officials, and the American missionaries and relief workers with whom I talked is that between 10,000 and 12,000 men, women, and children were shot, bayoneted, or burned to death, at least double that number died from exposure and starvation, and an enormous number—­I have heard the figure placed as high as 200,000—­were rendered homeless.  The stories which I heard of the treatment to which the Albanian women were subjected are so revolting as to be unprintable.  We spent a night at Ljaskoviki (also spelled Gliascovichi, Leskovik and Liascovik), three-quarters of which had been destroyed.  Out of a population which, I was told, originally numbered about 8,000, only 1,200 remain.

[Illustration:  THE HEAD MEN OF LJASKOVIKI, ALBANIA, WAITING TO BID MAJOR AND MRS. POWELL FAREWELL]

Though the great majority of the victims were Mohammedans, the outrages were not directly due to religious causes but were inspired mainly by greed for territory.  When, upon the erection of Albania into an independent kingdom in 1913, the Greeks were ordered by the Powers to withdraw from North Epirus, on which they had been steadily encroaching and which they had come to look upon as inalienably their own, they are reported to have begun a systematic series of outrages upon the civil population of the region for which a fitting parallel can be found only in the Turkish massacres in Armenia or the horrors of Bolshevik rule in Russia.  In their determination to secure Southern Albania for themselves, the Greeks apparently adopted the policy followed with such success in Armenia by the Turks, who asserted cynically that “one cannot make a state without inhabitants.”

I do not think that the Greeks attempt to deny these atrocities—­the evidence is far too conclusive for that—­but even as great a Greek as M. Venizelos justifies them on the ground that they were provoked by the Albanians.  That such things could happen without arousing horror and condemnation throughout the civilized world is due to the fact that in the summer of 1914 the attention of the world was focused on events in France and Belgium.  I have no quarrel with the Greeks and nothing is further from my desire than to engage in what used to be known as “muck-raking,” but I am reporting what I saw and heard in Albania because I believe that the American people ought to know of it.  Taken in conjunction with the behavior of the Greek troops in Smyrna in the spring of 1918, it should better enable us to form an opinion as to the moral fitness of the Greeks to be entrusted with mandates over backward peoples.