lement of the population to be capable of united action, and never
do they seem to have provoked any outburst of Moslem fanaticism. They
had local quarrels and fights with the more warlike Kurds who encroached
on Armenia, and in the towns where they settled they often incurred the
vague jealousy and dislike which are the penalties of a race superior
morally and intellectually to those among whom they live. But that
superiority constituted in course of time the 'Armenian question,' to
which Abdul Hamid alluded. In all, some sixty years ago their entire
race numbered about 4,000,000 persons, of whom about 1,250,000 inhabited
Russian Trans-Caucasia, about 150,000 were in the province of
Adarbaijan, and there were smaller bodies of them in Austria and India.
The remainder, some 2,500,000, were spread over Armenia, over the
villages and towns of Turkey, notably the eastern edge of the Cilician
uplands, while in Constantinople itself there were certainly not less
than 150,000, and probably as many as 200,000. To-day, the male portion
of the Armenian race in the Ottoman Empire has practically ceased to
exist: a quarter of a million men and women escaped over the Russian
frontier, five thousand escaped to Egypt, and there are a few thousand
women and girls (it is impossible to ascertain the exact number) in
Turkish harems. Turkism, as administered by Abdul Hamid first, then, far
more efficiently, by Enver Pasha, and Talaat Bey, has solved the
Armenian question.

The history of its solution falls under two heads, of which the first
concerns the manner in which it was solved in Armenia itself, where the
population was almost exclusively Armenian, both in towns and in the
country. Here the eastern and north-eastern frontiers of Turkey, across
which lie the province of Russian Trans-Caucasia and Persia, pass
through the middle of districts peopled by men of Armenian blood, and
when, in the autumn of 1914, the Turks made their entry into the
European War, their eastern armies, operating against Russia, found
themselves confronted by troops among whom were many Armenians, while in
their advance into the Persian province of Adarbaijan, there were in the
ranks of their opponents, Armenians and Syriac Christians. They advanced
in fact, in the first weeks of the war, into a country largely peopled
with men of the same blood as those on their own side of the frontier.
Though the edict had not yet come from Constantinople for the massacre