tsmen of Constantinople, must be
abandoned: then was decreed a 'close time' for Armenians, the shooting
season was over. There is no exaggeration in this: eye-witnesses have
recorded how at the close of the business day in Constantinople,
shooting parties used literally to go out, and beat the coverts of
tenement houses for Armenians, of whom there were at that time in
Constantinople some 150,000. But when Abdul Hamid had finished his
sport, I do not think more than 80,000 at the most survived. These were
saved by the protests of Europe, and perhaps by the knowledge that if
all the Armenians were killed, there could never be any more shooting.
The Kurds also had lost a considerable number of men, and that was far
from displeasing to the yellow-faced butcher of Yildiz. A little
blood-letting among those turbulent Kurds was not at all a bad thing.

Here, then, we see defined and at work the new Ottoman policy with
regard to its peoples. Hitherto, it had been sufficient to take from
them its fill of man-power, and leave the tribe in question to its own
devices. There was no objection whatever to its developing the resources
of its territory, to its increasing in prosperity and in population.
Indeed the central Power was quite pleased that it should do so, for
when next the gathering of taxes and youths came round the collectors
would find a creditable harvest awaiting them. Such a tribe received no
encouragement or help from the Government; that would have been too
much to expect, but as long as it kept quiet and obedient it might,
without interference, prosper as well as it could. But now, in the last
quarter of the nineteenth century, all that was changed; instead of a
policy of neglect there was substituted a policy of murder. The state no
longer considered itself secure when in various parts of its dominions
its subjects showed themselves progressive and industrious. They had to
be kept down, and clearly the most efficient way of keeping people down
was killing them. Let it not be supposed for a moment that either the
first massacre, or any that followed, was the result of local
disturbances and fanaticism. It was nothing of the sort: each was
arranged and planned at Constantinople, as the official means, invented
by the arch-butcher, Abdul Hamid, of maintaining in power the most
devilish despotism that has ever disgraced the world. Something had to
be done to prevent the alien tribes in Asia slipping out of the noose o