Everybody bowed as he walked down the nave, and we then proceeded to the Protestant church.
This was nothing but a large room in the clergyman's house. On our entry, some boys sang a hymn in English. They pronounced the words tolerably well, though they were ignorant of their meaning, the clergyman who spoke our language having taught his pupils merely to read the Roman characters. There were no pictures or images of any kind in the room. A simple baptismal font was its sole ornament. After the hymn had concluded, the clergyman, without putting on any extra vestments, addressed his congregation in a few straightforward and practical sentences, saying that as it was the duty of the Jews to pay tribute to Cæsar, it was equally proper for all true Christians to respect the Turkish authorities; that the Turks were on the eve of a great struggle with a power which oppressed all religions but its own, and consequently it was the duty of all Armenian Protestants to aid the Government in the forthcoming struggle, and shed the last drop of their blood for the Padishah.
The inhabitants of the town are not a trading community, most of them live by agriculture. There was a considerable amount of grumbling to be heard about the bankrupt state of the country; I learnt that many of the farmers had invested their savings in Turkish bonds, and had lost their capital. A Greek doctor who gave me this information had been established for many years in Egin.
"What do you think of the Turkish doctors?" I inquired.
"They are very ignorant," he replied; "but what can you expect in a country where it is not permitted to study anatomy, &c., in a practical way?"
"What, do they not allow dissection?" I asked.
"No. And even if you were convinced that a patient had died of poison, it would be very difficult to obtain permission to make a post mortem examination of his body. The result is that poisoners go unpunished. The Turkish surgeons are so ignorant that they cannot even tie up an artery, much less perform an average operation."
The Caimacan now joined in our conversation, which was in Italian, and began to find fault with the old school of Turks, which is an enemy to education, and bigoted about religious matters.
"I make no difference between a Christian or a Mussulman," said the governor. "All religions are good, provided that the man who practises them is honest."
"What we require are schools for the elder Turks," he continued; "something to force them to advance with the age, and to make them forget that old maxim, 'What was good for my father, is it not good enough for me?' Until they forget this, there will not be much improvement in Turkey. A company once offered to make a railway from Diarbekir to Constantinople, and, if Sultan Abdul Aziz had not spent all the money he borrowed from you English people in palaces and his harem, the railway might have been made. Meat is here only one penny a pound; at our seaports you have to pay fourpence for the same quantity. We have mines, too, but no means of transporting the mineral if we worked them. I have been at Egin six months," he continued. "I may be dismissed at any moment. What inducement is there for a man to try and improve the condition of the people, when all his work may be upset by his successor? We Caimacans are underpaid," he added. "We have not enough to live upon. If we received a better salary, and our positions were more stable, there would be less bribery throughout the Turkish empire."