Such was the past upon which the worn old man, stretched on his monastic bed, looked back that winter’s morning. Singleness of aim has its reward in spiritual peace, but of the future he was not hopeful. He no longer even contemplated an autonomous Armenia, either on Turkish territory or on Russian. On the Russian side of the frontier the Armenian villages were too scattered, too much interspersed with Georgians and Tartars, to allow of autonomy. On the Turkish side, he thought, massacre and exile had now left too few of the race to form any kind of community. Indeed, for the last twelve years the Armenian villagers have been crawling over the foot of Ararat by thousands a year to escape the Kurds, and every morning they come and stand in fresh groups of pink and blue rags outside the monastery door where the head of their Church and race lies dying. They stand there in mute appeal, as I saw them, possessing nothing in the world but the variegated tatters that cover them, and their faith in their Katholikos. Slowly they are drafted away into Tiflis, Baku, or their Caucasian villages, but nowhere are they welcomed. Some of the bishops and monks, who form a council round their chief, still look for Europe’s interference, and trust that the solemn pledges taken by England and other Powers at Berlin may be fulfilled. The Bishop of Erivan, for instance, still labors for the appointment of a Christian governor over the district marked by the ill-omened names of Van, Bitlis, and Erzeroum. I also found that even among the Georgians there was a large party willing to concede all the frontier district from Erivan to Kars, where Armenian villages are thickest, as an autonomous Armenian province, in the happy day when the Caucasus wins federal autonomy. But the majority of the Armenian clergy, who hitherto have led the people, are beginning to acquiesce in the hopelessness of political change, and are now limiting their efforts to education and industries. One cannot yet say how far their influence may be surpassed in the growing revolutionary parties of “The Bell” and “The Flag.” Of these, the Social Democratic “Bell” follows the usual impracticable and pedantic creed of St. Marx. The “Flag,” or party of Nationalist Democrats, is at present dominant, and at a great assembly held in Erivan last August (1906) they adopted a programme of land nationalization, universal suffrage and education, an eight-hour day, and the control of the Church property by elected laymen. If the Russian revolution makes good progress, they will naturally unite with the Georgian Federalists, on whom the best hopes of the country are set.