The local administrators of provinces and sub-districts—Valis, Mutessarifs and Kaimakams—are certainly very deeply to blame. The latitude allowed them by the Central Government was wide, as is shown by the variations they practised, in different places, upon the common scheme. In this place the Armenian men were massacred; in that they were deported unscathed; in that other they were taken out to sea and drowned. Here the women were bullied into conversion; here conversion was disallowed; here they were massacred like the men. And in many other matters, such as the disposal of Armenian property or the use of torture, remarkable differences of practice can be observed, which are all ascribable to the good or bad will of the local officials. A serious part of the responsibility falls upon them—upon fire-eaters like Djevdet Bey or cruel natures like the Governor of Ourfa[[274]]; and yet their freedom of action was comparatively restricted. Where they were evilly-intentioned towards the Armenians they were able to go beyond the Central Government’s instructions (though even in matters like the exemption of Catholics and Protestants, where their action was apparently most free, they and the Central Government were often merely in collusion)[[275]]; but they might never mitigate their instructions by one degree. Humane and honourable governors (and there were a certain number of these) were powerless to protect the Armenians in their province. The Central Government had its agents on the spot—the chairman of the local branch of the Committee of Union and Progress[[276]], the local Chief of Gendarmerie, or even some subordinate official[[277]] on the Governor’s own administrative staff. If these merciful governors were merely remiss in executing the instructions, they were flouted and overruled; if they refused to obey them, they were dismissed and replaced by more pliant successors. In one way or another, the Central Government enforced and controlled the execution of the scheme, as it alone had originated the conception of it; and the Young Turkish Ministers and their associates at Constantinople are directly and personally responsible, from beginning to end, for the gigantic crime that devastated the Near East in 1915.
[213]. The Paulikian exiles inspired the South-Slavonic Bogomils; the Bogomils inspired the Albigenses of Languedoc, and possibly sowed some of the seeds of the Hussite movement among the Tchechs and Slovaks.
[214]. With the possible exception of the Bulgars.
[215]. The Armenian Protestants have even been admitted to the Gregorian National Assembly—a notable departure from Near Eastern tradition.
[216]. There is a flourishing colony of Armenian fruit-growers as far afield as Fresno, California.
[217]. Though even in Irak there were Armenian settlers, especially at Baghdad.
[218]. The nomadic Kurds, for that matter, are only skin-deep Mohammedans.
[219]. Excluding the district of Hakkiari.
[220]. A Syrian sect whose doctrines diverged, like those of the Nestorians, from the creed of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, but in the contrary direction.