Yes, people in this country heard much about the massacres. Doubtless they were abominable, and doubtless many innocent persons were slaughtered. But it is only common justice that one should try to find out what were the reasons for attacking Armenians before one judges and condemns those who did so. It is a fact that there was never such an outburst of enmity to the Armenians before; if there had been, there would not be over two millions living in the Ottoman empire now. The Armenians are an adventurous race; they can go anywhere, settle anywhere, and become subject to any State. Some years before the troubles, many of the foreign subject Armenians came over to Turkey, styling themselves Frenchmen, Englishmen and Americans, sometimes in the shape of missionaries, sometimes as teachers. These adventurers, together with the revolutionary Russian subject Armenians, who came mostly from the Caucasus, began to stir up the people of their own race all over Asiatic Turkey in favour of a national independence. The younger generation of the Armenian people, becoming intoxicated with great ideas and dreams of a national kingdom, overlooked the impossibility of establishing any such thing in any particular part of the Ottoman dominions, and did not realise that their people formed a miserable minority everywhere. It has been maintained by their political sympathisers in England that their agitations were for the purpose of being better governed, and in no way a separatist movement; but this is absurd, and was merely an after-thought. As a matter of fact the Armenians gave loud expression to their new aspirations of having an independent kingdom in Eastern Asia Minor. We heard everywhere from them that the Christian Powers--above all, Great Britain were going to hand over that portion of the 'decaying' Ottoman empire to them, as they had handed over Ottoman territories before to other Christian races of the East They were simply awaiting the prophesied moment of the partition of Turkey to establish their independence on their share of the divided territory. I myself heard Armenians talking about who were to be the future rulers among their own people. The Turks began to ask themselves such questions as, "Why do these people revolt against us when we suffer from misrule much more than they do, and when, moreover, the official misdeeds are partly due to Armenian jacks-in-office?"[6] The agitation among the Armenians grew worse and worse every day; the agitators resorted to the same old method, namely, they tried to provoke the Turkish populace to retaliate on its offenders, hoping that this would be represented in Europe as an outburst of Mussulman fanaticism, and would induce the Powers to intervene, and so hasten the partition. The Turks, or, more widely speaking, the Mussulman population of Asiatic Turkey, were gravely discussing what could be done to check this overbearing and mischievous behaviour. Turkish women and children were exposed to