Crescent and Iron Cross by E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
page 39 of 152 (25%)
page 39 of 152 (25%)
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whether pastorally in their native highlands, or in the shops and
offices of the towns to which they migrated. They were not, till the time of Abdul Hamid, held to be in any sense a national danger, for, except in Armenia proper, they were too scattered and too peace-loving an element 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 |
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