Men of that nationality exist everywhere; and no "shadrach" in a blast furnace refuses more obstinately to melt and become assimilated to the rest of the iron ore, than they refuse to assimilate themselves to their neighbours. They are found elsewhere only in colonies; but even in this their original home, massacre, oppression, and the deliberate planting of counter-balancing colonies of Kurds in villages whence the original owners have been expelled, has reduced them to something less than half the present population. As a people there are few who have a good word for them. They are said to be cowardly and treacherous; to be mere money-grubbers, and so on _ad nauseam_. The charges vary; but all agree that the objects of them are objectionable somehow. They seem, in fact, to be a sort of Dr. Fell of nationalities; for every one dislikes them, though often enough they cannot tell the reason. Even the writer, who has not the least objection to thieves, murderers, and devil-worshippers, and who has a kindly feeling for a successful cheat, admits to getting on less well with Armenians than with other Orientals. And yet there is much about them that anyone must admire. They have, in fact, much in common with the Jew, who excites much the same feeling among many estimable people! Both have the same attachment, alike to money and to their own peculiar form of religion. Both have the same power of endurance and toughness. And as both have had much the same treatment for generations, and both are nations without a country, they have developed much the same characteristics. Money and intrigue have been their only weapons; and they have naturally come to think these the most important of all things. We can have nothing but admiration for their devotion to their nation, with which their religion and their church is bound up; and they have a high sense of their duty to it, as shown by their educational institutions. Men call them a nation of cowards; but that charge at least is false. In the massacres of 1895, armed men were butchering unarmed; and there was no test of anything but passive endurance. Yet how many could have saved their lives by a mere verbal acceptance of Islam? We shall have a good deal to say to the discredit of the revolutionaries among them, the "_Fedais_;" but at least the terror that that very small body could inspire among Turks and Kurds in three provinces ought alone to acquit them of any reproach of cowardice. Both as nation and as church they have a long history, for which we may refer the reader to such works as Lynch's "Armenia." They have been subject to the Ottoman Turks since the year 1365, when the latest of a series of Armenian kingdoms finally collapsed. But outlying colonies of their nation exist, as is well known, in several lands, notably in Persia and India.