taken together they rank third in numerical strength, after the Arabs
and Turks. There are mountain Kurds and Kurds of the plain, husbandmen
and herdsmen, Kurds who have kept to their original homes along the
eastern frontier, and Kurds who, under Ottoman auspices, have spread
themselves over the Armenian plateau, the North Mesopotamian steppes,
the Taurus valleys, and the hinterland of the Black Sea.

The chief thing the Kurds have in common is the Persian dialect they
speak, but it is usual to class as Kurds any and every community in the
Kurdish area which is not Turkish or Arab and can by courtesy be called
Moslem (the Kurds, for that matter, are only Moslems skin-deep). Such
communities abound: the Dersim highlands, in particular, are an
ethnographical museum; "Kizil-Bashi" is a general name for their kind;
only the Yezidis, though they speak good Kurdish, are distinguished from
the rest for their idiosyncrasy of worshipping Satan under the form of a
peacock (Allah, they argue, is good-natured and does not need to be
propitiated) and they are repudiated with one accord by Moslem and
Christian.

But not all the scattered elements in Turkey are isolated or primitive.
The Greeks and Armenians, for instance, are, or were, the most
energetic, intellectual, liberal elements in Turkey, the natural
intermediaries between the other races and western civilisation--"were"
rather than "are," because the Ottoman Government has taken ruthless
steps to eliminate just these two most valuable elements among its
subjects. The urban Greeks survive in centres like Smyrna and
Constantinople, but the Greek peasantry of Thrace and Anatolia has
mostly been driven over the frontier since the Second Balkan War. As for
the Armenians, the Government has been destroying them by massacre and
deportation since April, 1915--business and professional men, peasants