t by the very combination
that deposed him; his aims have been fully justified, and for that
precise reason we are right to classify him among the abhorred of
mankind. He had an opportunity such as is given to the few, and he made
the utmost of it, even as his greater successor on the throne of Turkey
for the present, namely Wilhelm II. of Prussia, has done, in the service
of the devil. 'Well done, thou good and faithful servant,' must surely
have been his well-deserved welcome, when he left the hell he had made
on earth for another.

Of all his subjects the Armenians were the most progressive, the most
industrious, the most capable. They therefore contributed, according to
that perverted foxlike mind, one of the greatest menaces to the
stability of his throne, which henceforth should owe its strength to the
weakness of those it governed. They, as all the world knows, are a
peaceful Christian people, and it was against them that Abdul Hamid
directed the policy which he had tested in Europe. The instruments he
employed to put it in force were the Kurds, a turbulent shepherd race
marching with and mixed up among the Armenians. By this means he had the
excuse ready that these massacres were local disturbances among remote
and insubordinate tribes, one of whom, however, the Kurds, he armed with
modern rifles and caused to be instructed in some elementary military
training. Their task was to murder Armenians, their pay was the
privilege to rape their girls and their women, and to rob the houses of
the men they had killed. The Armenians resisted with at first some small
success, upon which Abdul Hamid reinforced the Kurds with regular
troops, and caused it to be proclaimed that this was a war of Moslems
against the infidel, a Holy War. Moslem fanaticism, ever smouldering
and ready to burst into flames, blazed high, and a fury of massacres
broke forth against all Armenians, east and west, north and south. The
streets of Constantinople ran with their blood, and before Abdul Hamid
was obliged by foreign civilised Powers to stop those holocausts, he had
so decimated the race that not for at least a generation would they
conceivably be a menace again even to that zealous guardian of the
supremacy in its own dominions of the Ottoman power. Very unwillingly,
when obliged to do so, he whistled off his bands of Kurds, and dismissed
them: unwillingly, too, he gave orders that the Armenian hunts which had
so pleasantly diverted the spor