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