In the main we see that the mountain bears in its central part a homogeneous and coherent people. Distance from the core has slight effect upon the physical characteristics of the mountaineers, as long as they do not forsake the upland for the lowland. Their ideas, however, undergo modifications which can be interpreted as concessions to the views of more powerful peoples with whom contact is established. Customs, however, generally remain unchanged even if they have to be maintained in secrecy. Nevertheless, relief alone cannot account for the variety of peoples and religions in Asiatic Turkey. The easternmost fringe of Christianity emerging sporadically out of an ocean of Mohammedanism discloses, by the variety of its discordant elements, the extent to which distance from Constantinople, the religious capital of the eastern church, had weakened the power of ecclesiastical authority. Armenians, Nestorians, Chaldeans, Jacobites and Maronites, one and all heretics in the eyes of Orthodox prelates, were merely independent thinkers who relied on the remoteness of their native districts in order to protest, without peril to themselves, against the innovations of Byzantine theologians, or to stand firm on the basis of the rites and doctrines of early Christianity. From the social standpoint the eastern half of Asiatic Turkey deserves investigation as the seat of an immemorial conflict between nomadism and sedentary life. Every stage of the transition between the two conditions may be observed. The feuds which set community against community in Turkey often originate in the divergent interests of nomad and settled inhabitant, and are enforced by economic factors. As an example the Kurds of the Armenian highlands may be mentioned. The perpetuation of nomadism in their case is the result of extensive horse-breeding[267]--their chief source of revenue--which compels them to seek low ground in winter. Viewed as a whole, Asiatic Turkey has changed from an ideal nursery of hardy men to a land of meeting between races and peoples as well as between their ideals. It may be safely predicted that the future of its inhabitants bids fair to be as intimately affected as their past by the remarkable situation of the country and its physical features. One can only hope, for their sake, that a thorough invasion of highland and lowland by the spirit of the west will not be delayed much longer. This much may be said now, that the establishment of Christian rule in the land would probably be attended by wholesale conversions to Christianity in many so-called Mohammedan communities, where observance of Islamic rites has been dictated by policy, rather than by faith.