FOREWORD 



THE TRUE CHARACTER OF TURKISH RULE 



I THINK those who are now working with all their vigour to 

 secure for Armenia a distinct nationality in the re-arrangement 

 of Europe and Asia which will follow the conclusion of the War 

 are right in trying to bring home to us the character of the 

 Turk, both in its evil aspects and in what it may have imported 

 into Western Asia that was of any lasting good. 



Actual Turkish nationality there is none nowadays ; that is 

 to say, any territory of appreciable size in Europe or Asia which 

 is peopled homogeneously by the Mongolian tribes once known 

 as "Turks," and distinguished from other Mongolians by the 

 Turkish speech. In their old East Asiatic homes the Turks 

 were replaced by other variants of the Mongol type and other 

 languages, some quite dissimilar. West of Turkestan (which 

 has at the present day peoples that are not Turks at all in 

 affinity of race and speech) the Turk was never more than a 

 military caste ; strong enough however to make his East Asiatic 

 speech the dominant tongue in Asia Minor. The people that 

 our ancestors knew as " Turks " in the middle ages and down 

 to. the nineteenth century were, when one diagnosed their 

 ethnology, Kurds, Tatars, Armenoids, Phrygians, Lazis, 

 Greeks, Galatians, Goths, Arabs, Syrians, Slavs, Albanians, 

 Cherkess, Ossetes, Iranians, renegade Italians, and renegade 

 Jews. But the original Turks had brought with them the 

 Turkish spirit, the spirit which had prompted the Hun and the 

 Avar, the Tatar, and the original Bulgar, the Petcheneg, the 

 Seljuk, and the Othmani to ravage and destroy for the mere lust 

 of destruction and of stupid conquest. 



All these Turkish-Tatar tribes have deserved a prominent 

 place on the black list of human history. They half destroyed 



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