Two further points are suggested to me as calling for special remark. In the first place, I am satisfied that the total population of the Turkish provinces is in excess of the figure which I give. That figure only shows a percentage of population to the square mile of less than thirty[10]; in the Russian provinces, which can scarcely be called populous by comparison, although they probably contain less waste land, the percentage is over forty-nine. Secondly, while the greatest care has been taken to get the totals of the different peoples at least correct in the proportion which they bear to one another, it is probable in the cases of the Armenians and of the Kurds that even for this purpose the figures are a little too low. I have preferred to content myself with reproducing the statistical materials which, however imperfect, I consider the best, and only to mention in this connection the general impression which I have received.[11]
Among the inhabitants of the Turkish provinces who are classed as Mussulmans there exist considerable differences both of race and of religion; but for our present purpose it is most useful to distinguish them according as they are Turkish or Kurd. Under the former name I have counted the Mussulman population of the northern portion of the Government of Erzerum, or, to use more specific language, of the entire Government of Erzerum, with the exception of the sanjak of Bayazid and the cazas of Khinis, Kighi and Terjan. I have also included as Turkish one-half of the Mussulman inhabitants of the caza of Pasin. In the Governments of Van and of Bitlis the only portion of the population which I have thought it safe to number as Turkish are the Mussulmans in the towns of Van, Bitlis and Mush; as citizens in Governmental centres they are attached, if not by a common origin, at least by a common character and common sympathies to the interests of the ruling race. In the cases of the Government of Kharput and of the Governmental division of Palu, I have been unable to verify by personal acquaintance the estimates which I have adopted as the best; these estimates make the Turkish about as strong as the Kurdish element in the sanjak of Kharput, and a little less numerous in the caza of Palu. That part of the Mussulman population of the sanjak of Dersim who are counted as adherents of Government may most usefully be classed as Turkish and have been included in the roll of Turks. In the several Governments the remainder of the Mussulman inhabitants compose the total which has been given for the Kurds.
To express these results in general language, we may say that the seat of the Turkish population is the country on the north of Erzerum, while the Kurds inhabit the more southerly districts of the tableland, extending to the southern peripheral mountains. But what is the meaning of the name Turkish which has been used to distinguish the one from the other element? We must certainly guard ourselves from the danger of attributing to a convenient political designation an ethnological sense. We are justified in declaring that the Mussulman inhabitants of the northern districts of the Government of Erzerum are not of Kurdish origin; on the other hand, the ground is less tenable if we suppose that they belong to the Turkish race. How large an admixture of Turkish blood may flow within their veins, is a question which it is impossible to determine; it was rather the fertile country on the west of the Euphrates that presented the most attractive settling ground to the invading hordes of Turks. I am given to believe that a considerable number derive from the widely spread Georgian family; but that family has here mixed with other race elements, of which the Turkish is one. In what pertains to national solidarity, in the possession of common interests and common sentiments, these Mussulman inhabitants of the northern districts may justly be classed as Turks. But even this statement is subject to exception and cannot be universally applied. Just as in the northern zone of peripheral mountains there still exist whole districts of which the inhabitants have adopted the Mohammedan religion, but retain their essential affinity to the Greek race to which they belong, so within the statistical area of the tableland among the ranks of the Mussulmans may be found considerable aggregates of people who, although of Armenian origin, profess the dominant creed. In the northern province an important instance of this change in religion rather than in nationality is found in the district of Tortum between Erzerum and the town of Olti; the Mussulman inhabitants of that district are said to be the descendants of the ancient Armenian families who are known to have lived there within historical times.
While the Turkish inhabitants are engaged in agriculture and in those pursuits of urban life which attach to the service of Government or of individuals, or to the less ambitious among the requirements of industry and commerce, the Kurdish population, on the other hand, present a variety of social development which includes both the sedentary and the nomadic state, the organisation of the commune and that of the tribe. A people who were known to a remote antiquity and whose character is already sufficiently familiar in Europe, the Kurds who inhabit the tableland are not only distinguished from one another according to the plane of social life to which they have attained, but are divided by essential differences of language and of creed. From the neighbourhood of the town of Sivas in Asia Minor to beyond Malatia on the south, and between the two branches of the Euphrates to the vicinity of Mush, the Kurds, although classed in the official lists as Mussulmans, neither practise the orthodox religion nor speak the same dialect as their neighbours of presumably kindred race. Branded throughout the Nearer East under the opprobrious name of Kizilbash, they harbour a sullen hatred of the Turkish Government, whose attempts to convert them to orthodoxy they resent; while towards the Christians they are drawn by the impulse of a common antagonism to the existing order, and by the respect in which they hold the Christian religion, in the person of whose Founder they recognise an incarnation of God. Their religion, so far as we know it, bears the impress of the Aryan mind, which seeks for a human embodiment of the Deity; they invest with divine attributes Moses and Jesus, Mohammed and Ali. Their language, although a branch of the Kurdish, contains an admixture both of Persian and Armenian words, and is said to differ so greatly from the prevailing dialect of the Kurdish tongue that those who are familiar with the one are unable to understand the other. While they practise the rite of circumcision and have adopted certain of the observances of Islam, the contempt in which their religion is held by their Mussulman neighbours of the Sunni sect disposes them against the dominant creed, which they regard as a dangerous enemy of their own peculiar faith. In brief, they constitute a separate element in the Kurdish population of the tableland, and the numerical value of this element may be placed at about a third of the total figure which I have given for the Kurds in the Turkish provinces. Their geographical position between and about the two branches of the Euphrates invests them with some contemporary importance from a military point of view; and they hold the wild and mountainous country on the south of the headquarters of the Turkish Army Corps at the town of Erzinjan. In this district, which is known under the name of the Dersim, they have long resisted and continue to resist the imposition of the Turkish yoke. They are here in the tribal and pastoral state; but they have been obliged by the rigour of the climate to dwell in houses, and they cultivate small strips of land. In the country on the west and east of the Dersim the Kizilbashes are peaceful and industrious peasants, of whom most travellers have spoken with respect.
If we draw on the map an imaginary line from Mush through Erzerum towards the sea, the Mussulman population of the Turkish provinces are distributed in the following manner over the area of the tableland. On the north of Erzerum and on either side of this line the Turkish population extend from the Russian border on the east along the banks of the Western Euphrates to its junction with the eastern branch. The country south of Erzerum and on the west of the line is the seat of the Kizilbash Kurds; while on the east are situated the Kurds who profess the orthodox religion and speak the prevailing dialect of Kurdistan. The territorial extension of the Kurdish people varies according as the forces of order are strengthened or decline, but their original home and natural habitation are the mountains which contain the sources of the Tigris. From the Euphrates on the west to the Persian Gulf upon the south the zone of buttress ranges which support the tablelands of Armenia and Persia, and which we know at first under the name of Taurus and then under that of Zagros, is inhabited by tribes of Aryan origin—the Kurds and further south the Lurs—who are distinguished by considerable variations in dialect and in religion, but who present the common characteristic of an inveterate aversion to settled life and to the imposition of the yoke of law. Their manner of living is directly determined by their geographical position and pastoral pursuits. As spring develops into summer and the yellow drought creeps higher and higher up the slopes of the mountain-sides, they ascend from one to another step, from a lower to a higher chain, and arrive, perhaps at the approach of autumn, on the fringe of the tableland. When at length the season is verging upon winter the migration southwards begins. A continuous throng of sheep and goats and horses and weather-worn people of either sex and every age flows slowly down the blighted country, filing by tortuous tracks between the boulders or pausing about the noonday hour by the bed of a shaded stream. At the foot of the range, on the verge of the vast alluvial plains through which the Tigris winds, is placed their winter encampment; their tents are sufficient shelter against the climate of the low country, which even through the colder months is temperate and mild. These yearly migrations of the Kurdish tribes are not conducted without great suffering on the part of the settled population; their granaries are plundered by the shepherd army, and the land which they might have cultivated is occupied by the nomads during winter as pasture for their flocks. But this is a problem which belongs to the southern peripheral region and to the lowlands, rather than to the tableland. The Kurds of the tableland—with the possible exception of the Kizilbashes—are an alien element of the population. The great distance of their pastures from the plains of the Tigris makes it difficult for them, if not impossible, to pursue their instinctive migration; the rigorous winter obliges them to discard their tents and inhabit villages—in a word, to take the first step towards a more settled order, of which the further development is viewed by some of them with just alarm, as incompatible with their tribal organisation and independent life.
We may place at the kernel of the Armenian Question in Turkey the difficulties which arise from the presence of this Kurdish population upon the Armenian plateau. It is true that a considerable number among them have become industrious cultivators and subsist on the fruits of their own toil. According as the period which separates them from their former life is long or short, or the name of their more lawless kinsmen is despised or respected, these peasants will answer the traveller who inquires to what people they belong either by replying that they are Osmanli or by owning to their being Kurds. In the first case they rank themselves with the settled Turkish population; in the second they acknowledge the bond which attaches them to the free life of the tribe. But the weight of this agricultural element lies in the scale of peace; it is otherwise with those Kurds who retain to the full their tribal organisation and who pasture their flocks on the lofty highlands which extend to the plain of Erzerum. It is possible that from a remote period the nomads of Kurdistan proper may have advanced the limit of their summer journey beyond the plain of Mush, to return at the approach of winter to the neighbourhood of Diarbekr. How far their migration should be extended would be determined by the distance which separated them from their winter quarters on the lowlands, and by the degree of resistance which the settled peoples might be able to offer to their unwelcome approach. The fall of the feudal system in Turkey and the decline of the power of the Turkish beys may no doubt have contributed in a sensible manner to open breaches to the Kurds; but it appears that a powerful colony of this people were brought to their present seats in Armenia through a definite act of public policy on the part of the Turkish Power. After the defeat of the Persians in the plain of Chaldiran in 1514 it became necessary to arrive at a permanent settlement of the Kurdish provinces; and it formed part of the plan pursued by Edrisi, the distinguished Minister of Selim the First, and himself a Kurd of Bitlis, to remove a portion of this turbulent people from the country of their home and to settle them along the new frontier of Turkey in the districts bordering upon Persia and Georgia which had been acquired from the Shah. It is said that they were granted a perpetual immunity from taxation on the condition that they would act as a permanent militia upon the border which had been given them to guard.[12] Neither the evidence of subsequent history nor the contemporary political situation upon the tableland can be taken to have established the wisdom of a policy which appears to have overrated the capacity of the Kurds whether for benefit or for harm. On the one hand, by adding to the area inhabited by them, the Turkish Government seems rather to have increased the difficulties which have always beset their efforts to hold this people in check; and, on the other, their experience of the value of this militia can scarcely be so pleasant a memory as their persistent continuance in a worn-out ideal might lead us to expect. During the two campaigns against Russia of 1829 and 1854 the Kurdish chiefs played off one Power against another, and are even said to have assisted the invading armies by affording a passage through their adopted country and by providing them with supplies. In the campaign of 1877 the Kurds were the most dangerous element in the Turkish army, and are described by an eye-witness of the several actions in Asia as a grotesque corps of irregular cavalry breaking into groups when resisted and altogether unfitted for the serious operations of war. Their atrocious cruelty towards the wounded and their mutilation of the dead was visited upon the heads of their afflicted protectors in a general execration of the Turkish name. Yet even the bitterness of this disappointment and the scarcely doubtful lesson of several minor wars, which within the course of the past century they have been obliged to conduct against the Kurds, seem not to have convinced the Turkish Government of the folly of endeavouring to humour a people who will never be of any assistance to Government until they shall have lost for ever the power of resistance and ranged themselves on the side of law. The reigning Sultan in his dealings with the Kurds has inclined to the old policy; he has sought at once to civilise them and to render them more efficient from a military point of view. In the wild and seldom-visited country between the plain of Alashkert and the lake of Van I was able to gain a practical acquaintance with the methods that are being pursued. In the village of Patnotz, the principal seat of the notorious tribe of Haideranli, a solid stone structure, which has been built by order of Government to serve the several purposes of a mosque, a school, and a residence for the chief, stands out from the usual cluster of mud hovels—a palace among ant-hills. In every larger Kurdish village I found a petty officer of the Turkish army bewailing the sad fate which had brought him to this exile, and his own impotence to control the slippery people and constrain them to attend his drills. A new name, that of Hamidiyeh, has been given to this irregular cavalry, and they have been liberally supplied with uniforms from the Turkish magazines. The headquarters of the corps are at Melazkert on the Eastern Euphrates or Murad Su, and over thirty regiments have already been registered over the area of the tableland. Each regiment has a nominal strength of about 600 men. But they have never yet manœuvred together, and when in 1892 a detachment from each regiment paraded at Erzerum, I am informed that the whole number did not amount to 2000, and that the sorry spectacle was presented to the Turkish general of a motley company of aged men and half-grown youths, mounted on horses which wanted muscle and had perhaps never tasted corn. It is pleasant to acknowledge the good intentions of the Sultan in endeavouring to educate the Kurds and to organise them in a more efficient manner for the purposes of serious war; the ideal which has no doubt been present to the mind of his military advisers is the example of the Russian corps of Cossacks. But the mild measures at present in favour will never attain this result; it is not under such a policy that the Kurds will be subjected to the regular discipline of a camp. Either the young men must be taken from their native or adopted provinces and trained in the armies of the Empire at a distance from their homes, or the entire people must be made to bend to the yoke of an equal civil law, of which they at present evade the provisions and defy the ministers.
While the Turkish Government have little reason to be satisfied with the results of their experiments with the Kurds, the effects which derive from their presence on the tableland are disastrous in the extreme. Yet it is not the Mussulmans so much as the Armenians who are afflicted by this scourge. Let us pursue a little further our original analysis. Transplanted from their natural camping-grounds, and obliged through the long months of an arctic winter to provide themselves and their animals with shelter and with food, this pastoral people were quartered on the Armenian villages, but were required by Government to pay an annual tax in return for the accommodation which during winter they received.[13] But an arrangement which was based on the just principle of ensuring to the Armenian a fair remuneration for the lodging which he furnished and the fodder which he supplied, was put into practice by the local authorities in a characteristic manner: the proceeds of the tax were committed to their own coffers. In 1842, after the promulgation of the celebrated charter of reforms which is known under the name of the Hatti-Sherif of Gulkhaneh, a beginning was made towards the abolition of the system; the Kurds in the neighbourhood of Mush were allotted certain villages which had been vacated by the Armenian emigrants, and the Armenians of the district were relieved of the heavy burden which they had previously been obliged to bear. At the present day the pastoral Kurds of the plateau have all their own villages, and the old system, except in isolated instances, may be said to have disappeared. Yet even now the Kurds justify their raids upon the Armenians on the ingenious plea of the ancient right of quarter which they consider they are entitled to enforce. Policy also dictates a procedure which their tender conscience has approved. The Armenians are at once the most immediate and the least redoubtable among their neighbours. The courageous Kurd equips himself for the foray with a rifle of modern Russian pattern and belts bristling with cartridges; his victims, by a cruel and cynical provision, have been deprived by Government of all arms. Should the Kurd be caught red-handed and arraigned before the civil authority, he will scornfully defy the civil jurisdiction and claim to be tried by his military superiors as a trooper in the Hamidiyeh Corps. When the civil branch has been successfully thwarted, the military authorities are cajoled, while the injured party is rewarded by the visitation of a fresh injury, which he endures without complaint. I can understand that in Kurdistan proper with the lowlands about the course of the Tigris the shepherd problem presents some difficulty; it must always be a task of some magnitude to control a people whose migrations extend over so wide an area and whose country conceals within its countless recesses such inaccessible retreats. On the tableland the case is quite elementary: the pastoral Kurd belongs to a village, and that village is situated in the neighbourhood of the pastures from which he is driven by the winter snows. It cannot be a matter of great difficulty to follow up the robbers to their homes. It is well within the capacity of the existing authorities to enforce against them the necessary measures of police. But the tribal chiefs are well aware of the consequences which would flow from such a change in Turkish policy towards them, and they exert all the means at their disposal to avert it. Upon the tableland they enjoy a parasitical prosperity. Once prevented from levying their supplies of grain and fodder upon the Armenians, and restricted to the legitimate operations of barter with the peasantry or reciprocal trade, their tribes would gradually melt away, and, while a large number would join the ranks of the agricultural population, a remnant only would remain to continue in Armenia the shepherd calling and the tribal life.
The Armenians are distributed in the following manner over the statistical area of the Turkish provinces. Compared with the number of the Mussulman inhabitants, they are in greater strength in the Government of Van than in any other Government. Taking that Government as a whole, but of course excluding the Hakkiari, they exceed by about one-third the total of the Mussulman population. In the town of Van the proportion of Armenians to Mussulmans is about as two to one. In the Government of Bitlis they are in a majority in the neighbourhood of Mush, and in the fertile district of Bulanik, north-west of the lake of Van. On the other hand, they are outnumbered by the Mussulmans in the populous sanjak of Kharput, and in the caza or Governmental sub-division of Palu. In the Government of Erzerum there is scarcely a district in which they are not less numerous than their Mussulman neighbours. Yet, when estimating the relative strength of the Armenian element, we deceive ourselves if we dwell with complacent insistence on the fact of its numerical inferiority. Several factors essential to such an analysis deserve and require attention. In the first place, the most fertile portion of the country is held by the Armenians. The beautiful region about Lake Van, the vast plains of Bulanik, of Mush, and of Kharput are the principal seats of the Armenian peasantry—a peasantry as sturdy as the Mussulman settlers and far more industrious and progressive than they. Another advantage possessed by the Armenians is their favourable geographical situation in relation to the Turks and the Kurds. The Armenian population compose a mass of varying compactness which extends across the tableland from east to west, and may be said in a general manner to divide as with a wedge the two branches of the Mussulman inhabitants. Or the Armenian may be compared to the middle bedfellow of three. Again, the solidarity of the Armenian element, both from a political and a social point of view, is a fact which must not be ignored. Nowhere in a more conspicuous manner than upon the tableland has the Gregorian Church resisted the advances of Rome. According to the statistics supplied by the Catholic patriarch to Mr. Goschen, the number of the Catholics within the limits of our statistical area cannot amount to 20,000 souls. Of these, the great majority inhabit the northern districts of the Government of Erzerum, while in the country of Van and Mush, which is essentially Armenian, there are scarcely any adherents of Rome. It is true that the Protestant community is growing; if we include the Mission of Mardin lying outside our area, they are over 16,000 strong. But the paramount object which is present to the Protestant missionaries is not to subvert the national Church or to attach it to their own denomination, but rather to raise the standard of the national religion and to improve the social condition of the people among whom they have come to live. Finally, we must not overlook the high place which the Armenians already occupy in the economical order of the country, and the fact that the Armenian population is capable of very rapid expansion under kinder circumstances. I have already had occasion to speak in praise of the Armenian peasantry; yet, while agriculture suffers from the disappearance of the Armenian from the soil, the place which he occupies in the less rudimentary grades of civilised life can never be supplied. The worn and crippled machine of industry functions through him alone. His advancement means the progress of the country; his removal is the cause of its decay. Yet the stream of emigration continues, and is gathering fresh volume every year. The general exodus of the Armenian population which ensued upon the retirement into Russian territory of General Paskevich in 1839 has been followed by a gradual process of depletion, which varies in intensity according as harvests are good or disastrous and the Kurds are encouraged or restrained. During my stay in the country the Armenian peasantry of considerable districts were exerting themselves to pay off their debts, and to obtain permission to leave. Many were flying to the Russian frontier to seek an asylum from the Kurds. A change in policy is alone needed to transform a country which is rapidly becoming a desert into a prosperous and progressive province. Behind the Armenian population of the tableland stand their kinsmen who inhabit the less distracted districts of Asia Minor. At the first approach of a better era many of these would seek with eagerness the ancient home of their race. Many of the emigrants into Russia would return to their old seats. The tide now setting to America, whence the Armenians, like the Irish, transmit large sums of money to their less prosperous relations at home, would slacken if it did not cease. A country which even in its wildest regions still retains the traditions of Armenian civilisation, and is adorned with the remains of Armenian architecture, would resume the old order in a spirit essentially new.
Have I wearied my reader with this long and almost exhaustive analysis, at which I can scarcely myself suppress a yawn? At least we may console ourselves with the virtuous reflection that we have been disentangling a difficult subject of which we shall all hear more as the years go by. Most of us—for we are all rulers, and our voices reach far—will some day be expected to pronounce our opinion upon it; I have therefore endeavoured to present the facts in an uncoloured narrative. But it may be asked: why has so little been heard of the Armenians still residing in their native seats? Are they not a handful among the numbers of their countrymen dispersed over the Ottoman Empire, and inhabiting the capital or the great towns of Asia Minor? Sasun, where the massacres commenced in 1894, is surely a district which lies outside the proper limits of Armenia; while Sivas and Trebizond, Diarbekr, Marash and Aintab—cities of which the names are engraved in red upon our memories—are situated at great distances from the Armenian centres. Such reasoning is in a great measure true; it is the Berlin difficulty.
In the absence of reliable statistics I shall refrain from any attempt to trace the distribution of the Armenians over the whole extent of the Ottoman Empire. The total number of Armenians in Turkey was given by the delegates to the Berlin Congress as amounting to 3,000,000 souls. This figure is certainly too high. An Armenian clerical writer, who appears not to err on the side of exaggeration, has placed the entire Gregorian population, that is the great bulk of his countrymen in Turkey, at 1,263,900 souls.[14] It is reasonable to suppose that the Armenian subjects of the Sultan number upwards of one and a half millions, of whom some half million may be taken to inhabit the statistical area with which we have been dealing, after considerable additions have been made to supply the deficiencies in the lists. The remainder are spread over the Empire, forming fairly compact communities in the more populous towns. Previous to the massacres of 1895, the Armenians of Constantinople were estimated at 180,000 souls, of whom some 80,000 might be reckoned as immigrants for a certain period from such Armenian centres as Van and Arabkir, and the remainder were permanently established. Other considerable aggregates are forthcoming in Northern Syria and Cilicia, where, besides the towns, the mountainous district of Zeitun is inhabited by a vigorous and brave Armenian peasantry. The towns on the highlands of Asia Minor from the Euphrates to Brusa and Smyrna number large bodies of Armenians among their citizens. The same may be said of those on the lowlands from the Persian Gulf to Diarbekr. Trebizond contains a populous and flourishing settlement, as do most of the rising towns along the coast of the Black Sea. Indeed the Armenian is ubiquitous in the Nearer Asia, from the northern province of Persia to the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Yet this people as a whole can scarcely amount to more than 3,000,000 souls, a round figure of which the principal components are as follows:—