All through that anxious time the civil government was in abeyance; and nothing was set up in its place. The Vali was recently dead; his successor had not been chosen; the deputy Governor was at once a puppet and an imbecile. An honest man with a few policemen at his back could restore not only order but prosperity. There is only one essential of any importance: to reorganise the territorial boundaries of the provinces, select good governors and invest them with extensive powers. If my reader be inclined to smile at the choice of my epithet when applied to a Turkish official, I can only say that I much regret my inability to introduce him personally to the present holder of the office of Vali of Erzerum. I was privileged to make the acquaintance of Raouf Pasha on the occasion of my second visit. His career through a long life has been one of much distinction; he is honest, just, capable, humane. If such a man could only be freed from the leading-strings of the capital, he would go far towards a happy settlement of the Armenian question, and of the still more important question, the continuance of the Ottoman Empire. The Armenian inhabitants of the provincial capital are undergoing a state of transition from their ancestral customs to the less straitened manners of the West. But these customs die a hard death, and the emancipated Armenian who has studied in Europe must feel their fetters upon his return to his native land. Let us suppose that he wishes to marry; he must have recourse to his mother, or, if she be dead, to a female relation. A bride is chosen for him, whom, as likely as not, he does not see until the marriage ceremony has been performed. If the parents of the bridegroom be still alive, the newly-married couple reside with them; and it is the custom that, while sons and daughters are permitted to speak to their parents, a similar license is not usually accorded to the sons' wives. Thus a maiden quits a home where freedom of intercourse and speech is allowed her to enter one where she is not permitted to open her mouth. A son may not smoke in the presence of his father; and great are the agonies endured by the younger generation in this respect alone. The earnings of the sons are handed over to the father, who rules the family quite in the patriarchal style. A single family comprises a very large number of members, all living in the same house. In one house in which I visited there were not less than thirty. I photographed a group of five generations in this family, each person being in direct lineal descent. The infant is the son of the pretty young lady on the left of the picture, and it reposes on the lap of her great-grandmother (Fig. 169).