So far as I understand this vexed matter, the source of the graver trouble is the presence in the heart of Armenia of the defiant Kurdish race which raids the villages where the flocks are fattest and the women most fair, now cutting an Armenian’s throat, now leaguing with him in a war on a hostile tribe and resisting in common the troops sent up to restore the Sultan’s peace. Whatever the Kurd does is done for the sake neither of Crescent nor Cross, for he bears neither one emblem nor the other in his heart, but just because he is Ishmael, his hand is against every man who has aught to lose. The Armenian, for all his ineffaceable nationalism, his passion for plotting and his fanatical intolerance, would be a negligible thorn in the Ottoman side did he stand alone ... but behind the Armenian secret societies--and there are few Armenians who have not committed technical treason by becoming members of such societies at some period of their lives--it sees the Kurd, and behind the Kurd the Russian; or, looking west, it espies, through the ceaseless sporadic propaganda of the agitators, Exeter Hall and the Armenian Committees. The Turk begins to repress because we sympathize and we sympathize the more because he represses, and so the vicious circle revolves. Does he habitually, however, do more than repress? Does he, as administrator, oppress? So far we have heard one version only, one party to this suit with its stories of outrage and echoing through them a long cry for national independence. The mouth of the accused has been shut hitherto by fatalism, by custom, by the gulf of misunderstanding which is fixed between the Christian and the Moslem. If the Kurdish Question could be settled by a vigorous Marshal, and the Porte secured against irresponsible European support of sedition, I believe that the Armenians would not have much more to complain of, like the Athenian allies of old, than the fact of subjection--a fact, be it noted, of very long standing; for the Turk rules by right of five hundred years’ possession, and before his day the Kurd, the Byzantine, the Persian, the Parthian, the Roman, preceded each other as over-lords of Greater Armenia to the misty days of the first Tigranes. The Turk claims certain rights in this matter--the right to safeguard his own existence, the right to smoke out such hornets’ nests as Zeitun which has annihilated for centuries past the trade of the Eastern Taurus, the right to remain dominant by all means not outrageous. I see no question at issue but this of outrage. For the rest there is but academic sympathy with aspiring nationalisms or subject religion, sympathy not over cogent in the mouths of those who have won and kept so much of the world as we: Arria must draw the dagger reeking from her own breast before she can hand it with any conviction to Pætus.[215]