The self-sufficiency of the Armenian people has been indicated in the repeated failures of missionary religions and foreign cultures to alter appreciably the native folkways and mores. In spite of political subordination to Islam, the Gregorian church has held tenaciously to its ideals and has successfully maintained its independence. The distinctive social tradition,--which includes the political and the religious traditions,--has remained intact in the face of recurrent invasion, vassalage, and persecution. The Armenian will not be assimilated. Death is preferable to the loss of those intangible realities that make the people a distinctive group. When Haic, the patriarchal progenitor of the race, was invited to "soften his hard pride," and to return to the kingdom of the god Bel, the alternative, war, was chosen. In the year 450, when the Persian fire-worshippers invited the Armenians to change their faith, the answer again was war. The reply to the decision of Chalcedon illustrates the same spirit. Likewise through the centuries of the immediate past the ever recurring answer to the Turk has been war. Powerless to assimilate the Armenian people, the Turk has had to annihilate or be annihilated. The self-sufficiency of the people thus reveals itself in the will to maintain the distinctive social tradition, regardless of cost or sacrifice. The characteristic familism reveals itself not only in the customs of family life, but also in the very nature of the Armenian. In Russian Armenia there is a very active propaganda carried on by Russian girls to secure Armenian husbands because of the domesticity of the latter, which is in striking contrast to the adventurous unfaithfulness of the Russian husband, whose house becomes his prison, from which he therefore flees, leaving his wife and children to shift for themselves. The discontented Russian may be a more attractive lover for his "Wanderlust" and restlessness, but he is a less attractive husband for the same reason. An Armenian husband belongs in his home, where he lives in the hope that some day he may be the father of a huge household of married sons and grandsons. A young Armenian I know spoke to me of his wish that some day his father might collect the scattered sons and unite them and their families in a single household. This desire is so general among Armenians as to make it evident that the family is the all-important social unit. No reputation is so great as that carried by a good family name, nor is there any so damning as that which goes with a bad family name. And why is the young bride kept silent for years if not to ensure the all-essential family-unity, family-solidarity, and family-continuity,--that is, continuity of family tradition, manners, and customs? And why is the "patria-potestas" well-nigh unlimited if not for precisely the same reason? Nor is the taboo upon the young bride, according to which she may not speak to any young man not a relative during her