6. The books in the government offices at the Kaimakamlik are often incorrect through mistakes or dishonesty, and in consequence taxes are paid on fictitious names or on persons who have been dead for years.” “III. _Farming of taxes._ Taxes are often farmed out to the highest bidder, who usually is some powerful Kurdish chief. Either in consequence of his power, or by means of bribes, he is secure from interference on the part of the government. He collects the amount due the government and then takes for himself as much as he chooses, his own will or an exhausted threshing-floor being the only limit to his rapacity. While he is collector for these villages they are considered as belonging to him. During the year his followers pay frequent visits to the villages. They are ignorant and brutal, and on such visits, as also when collecting taxes, they treat the villagers with the utmost severity.” “IV. All the above assessors and collectors—and they are many, a different one for each kind of tax, personal, house and land, sheep, tobacco, etc.—on their visits to the villages, take with them _a retinue of servants and soldiers, who, with their horses, must be kept at the expense of the village, thus entailing a very heavy additional burden upon them_. Soldiers and servants sent to the villagers to make collections, very naturally take something for themselves.” All the preceding testimony refers to regions where Jacobite and Nestorian Christians predominate and thus prove that Armenians are by no means the only sufferers. The same state of affairs was found by Mrs. Bishop, who made investigations on the ground five years ago. “On the whole, the same condition of alarm prevails among the Armenians as I witnessed previously among the Syrian[10] _rayahs_. It is more than alarm, it is _abject terror_, and not without good reason. In plain English, general lawlessness prevails over much of this region. Caravans are stopped and robbed, travelling is, for Armenians, absolutely unsafe, sheep and cattle are being driven off, and outrages, which it would be inexpedient to narrate, are being perpetrated. Nearly all the villages have been reduced to extreme poverty, while at the same time they are squeezed for the taxes which the Kurds have left them without the means of paying. The repressive measures which have everywhere followed ‘the Erzerum troubles’ of last June [1890]—the seizure of arms, the unchecked ravages of the Kurds, the threats of the Kurdish Beys, who are boldly claiming the sanction of the government for their outrages, the insecurity of the women, and a dread of yet worse to come—have reduced these peasants to a pitiable state.”[11] Through the influence of the British Ambassador at Constantinople Mrs. Bishop was allowed to state the situation to the Grand Vizier in person, and on arriving in England she presented a detailed statement of facts to the Foreign Office and also to a Parliamentary Committee.