our enlightened Christian age.” Here the Armenians undoubtedly have a very real grievance, which Turkey must see to at once unless her rule is to pass from her in Asia as well as in Europe. But the task will not be an easy one. We need only put ourselves in her place in order to realize its difficulties. Here is a vast Mohammedan country, the Sovereign of which is acknowledged by international law to be the Sultan of Turkey. This country belonged to the Turks even before the discovery of America. To-day it is honeycombed with Christian, mostly Protestant, missionary schools, the avowed object of which is to educate a small Christian minority—be it admitted the most thrifty, shrewd, pushing, and intriguing of all Eastern races—in the Christian religion and at the same time in modern European ideas, and to bid them look to the Western world outside Turkey as their natural protector. This was bound to make these Asiatics discontented with their Asiatic status. It is denied that proselytism in any form was attempted or intended. I was informed by an American missionary at Bitlis, who had lived thirty years in Turkey, that formerly there was only one small Protestant Armenian sect in the whole of Armenia, and this was in the little town of Hunuesch, between Erzeroum and Bitlis. Yet statistics show that the pupils of the 621 Protestant schools distributed throughout Asiatic Turkey in 1896 numbered 27,000. Thus, whether proselytism has been intended or attempted, or not, it has, _de facto_, taken place on a large scale, for the existence of 27,000 Protestants, school pupils constantly renewed with each succeeding generation, out of a total Armenian population of half to three-quarters of a million (say a million if you will),[9] represents a preponderant percentage of Protestants among them. These are not views, but facts, which can be easily verified, and with regard to which the reader may draw his own conclusions. Footnote 9: According to Cuinet, the number of Armenians in the Turkish Empire some years ago was 1,144,000, of which about two-thirds would fall to Asiatic Turkey proper; whereas in Russian Transcaucasia there were said to be nearly 1,000,000 Armenians, and about 100,000 in Persia. The Armenians are thus scarcely more numerous in Asiatic Turkey than the Italians and Belgians in France, distributed over a country twice the size of France.