e during the last hundred years.
The Powers freed Serbia, giving Turkey first a suzerainty over her, and
finally abolishing that: they freed Bulgaria, they freed Greece, Eastern
Rumelia, Macedonia, Albania. But, as by some strange lapse of humanity,
they always regarded the subject peoples of Turkey in Asia as more
peculiarly Turkish, as if at the Bosporus a new moral geography began,
and massacre in Asia was comparatively venial as compared with massacre
in Europe. But now the Allies have said that there must be no more
massacres in Asia, nor any possibility of them. To secure this, it will
be necessary to sever from Turkey the lands where the alien peoples
dwell, and form autonymous provinces under the protectorate of one or
other of the allied nations. In most cases we shall find that there is a
protecting Power more or less clearly indicated, whose sphere of
interest is obviously concerned with one or other of these new and
independent provinces.

The alien race which for the last thirty years has suffered the most
atrociously from Turkish inhumanity is that of the Armenians, and it is
fitting to begin our belated campaign of liberation with it. If the
reader will turn to the map at the end of this book, he will see that
the district marked Armenia lies at the north-west corner of the old
Ottoman Empire, and extends across its frontiers into Russian
Trans-Caucasia. That indicates the district which once was peopled by
Armenians. To-day, owing to the various Armenian massacres, the latest
of which, described in another chapter, was by far the most appalling,
such part of Armenia as lies in the Ottoman Empire is practically, and
probably absolutely, depopulated of its Armenian inhabitants. Such as
survive, apart from the women whose lives were spared on their
professing Islamism and entering Turkish harems, have escaped beyond the
Russian frontier, and are believed to number about a quarter of a
million. In the meantime their homes have partly been destroyed and
partly occupied by mouhadjirs from Thrace, and by the Kurds who were
largely instrumental in butchering them. Their lands have been
appropriated haphazardly, by, any who laid hands on them.

Here the problem is of no great difficulty. The robber-tenants must be
evicted, and the remnant of the Armenians repatriated. Without
exception they escaped into Trans-Caucasia from villages and districts
near the frontier, else they could never have escaped from the purs