n, steadily and faithfully, as their fathers had
fought. They have no lust for war, no Arabian tradition of fighting for
its own sake, and little, if any, fanaticism. Attempts to inspire
Anatolian troops with religious rage in the Balkan War were failures. They
were asked to fight in too modern a way under too many Teutonic officers.
The result illustrated a prophecy ascribed to Ghasri Mukhtar Pasha. When
German instructors were first introduced into Turkey, he foretold that
they would be the end of the Ottoman army. No, these Anatolians desire
nothing better than to follow their plough-oxen, and live their common
village life, under any master who will let them be.

Elements of the Christian minority, however, Armenian and Greek, would
give trouble with their developed ideas of nationality and irrepressible
tendency to 'Europize'. They would present, indeed, problems of which at
present one cannot foresee the solution. It seems inevitable that an
autonomous Armenia, like an autonomous Poland, must be constituted ere
long; but where? There is no geographical unit of the Ottoman area in
which Armenians are the majority. If they cluster more thickly in the
vilayets of Angora, Sivas, Erzerum, Kharput, and Van, i.e. in easternmost
Asia Minor, than elsewhere, and form a village people of the soil, they
are consistently a minority in any large administrative district.
Numerous, too, in the trans-Tauric vilayets of Adana and Aleppo, the seat
of their most recent independence, they are townsmen in the main, and not
an essential element of the agricultural population. Even if a
considerable proportion of the Armenians, now dispersed through towns of
western Asia Minor and in Constantinople, could be induced to concentrate
in a reconstituted Armenia (which is doubtful, seeing how addicted they
are to general commerce and what may be called parasitic life), they could
not fill out both the Greater and the Lesser Armenias of history, in
sufficient strength to overbear the Osmanli and Kurdish elements. The
widest area which might he constituted an autonomous Armenia with good
prospect of self-sufficiency would be the present Russian province, where
the head-quarters of the national religion lie, with the addition of the
provinces of Erzerum, Van, and Kharput.

But, if Russia had brought herself to make a self-denying ordinance, she
would have to police her new Armenia very strongly for some years; for an
acute Kurdish problem would