To add to this curious fatuousness of conduct, the town Armenians are at once yielding and aggressive. They will willingly harbour revolutionaries, arrange for their entertainment and the furthering of their ends; yet at the same time they can be massacred without raising a finger in their own defence. He is as fanatical as any Moslem.... That the Armenians are doomed to be for ever unhappy as a nation seems to me unavoidable.... In a time of famine at Van the merchants tried to corner the available grain!... The Armenian revolutionaries prefer to plunder their co-religionists to giving battle to their enemies; the anarchists of Constantinople threw bombs with the intention of provoking a massacre of their fellow-countrymen. The Armenian villages are divided against themselves; the revolutionary societies are leagued against one another; the priests connive at the murder of a bishop; the church is divided at its very foundations.... If the object of English philanthropists and the roving brigands (who are the active agents of revolution) is to subject the bulk of the Eastern provinces to the tender mercies of an Armenian oligarchy, then I cannot entirely condemn the fanatical outbreaks of the Moslems or the repressive measures of the Turkish government. On the other hand, if the object of Armenians is to secure equality before the law, and the establishment of security and peace in the countries partly inhabited by Armenians, then I can only say that their methods are not those to achieve success. His description of the Armenians of the Mush Plain is instructive and interesting: The Armenians of the Mush Plain are at present an extremely difficult people to manage. They are very avaricious and would object to pay the most moderate taxes; they are also exceedingly treacherous to one another, and often join the revolutionaries to wipe off scores on their fellow villagers. As for the tactics of the revolutionaries, anything more fiendish one could not imagine—the assassination of Moslems in order to bring about the punishment of innocent men, the midnight extortion of money from villages which have just paid taxes by day, the murder of persons who refuse to contribute to their collection-boxes, are only some of the crimes of which Moslems, Catholics, and Gregorians accuse them with no uncertain voice. The following pen picture of the young Armenian who wept over the punishment of his great nation is a study in itself: