At the moment of preparing these pages for the press, sixteen years after my journey through Asiatic Turkey, I learn from several independent sources that although no recrudescence of the massacres has taken place, the conditions prevailing there to-day are even more unsatisfactory than of yore. The Imperial authority under the régime of the Young Turks is at a lower ebb even than in Abdul Hamid’s time. In addition thereto must be reckoned the dreadful losses in human life caused by the wars in Tripoli and the Balkans, so that the fields are now largely tilled by women and old men. The American mind is said to be able to find the shortest and straightest road from one given point—logical or material—to another. The Englishman may possibly come next to the American in this; the German is slower, but he is infallible in the long run, for he works a problem out stolidly with the assistance of logarithms and trigonometry. As you near the East, the capacity for discovering the short, straight, logical line decreases—the Austro-Hungarian finds it sometimes, the Turk hardly ever. This constitutional inability to seize the value of an established fact or series of facts, and to draw the obvious logical conclusion therefrom, has all along hampered the Turk in putting his case before the world, even in instances where seven out of ten points were in his favour. I have heard an educated Turk cite the case of an Armenian tailor who had deserted his wife and run away with another woman as a proof of the iniquity of that interesting race. In his lack of logic the Turk recalls the Swiss woman who appealed to the court for a divorce from her husband. On being asked what grounds she could advance in support, she replied after thinking awhile: “He is not the father of my last child.” Individual Americans, Englishmen, Germans—yes, even English missionaries—will now and then make out a better case for Turkey than all the Turks put together with whom I conversed during my several prolonged visits to Turkey. “Yes, you must remember this question has two sides. There is a deal to be said for the Turks; the Armenians are not all angels,” an American missionary said to me in Anatolia. “For, let there be no mistake about it, it is only the Pharisee who bids us fancy that the priests of Baal have erected altars exclusively among the Turks.”