Of all his subjects the Armenians were the most progressive, the most industrious, the most capable.  They therefore contributed, according to that perverted foxlike mind, one of the greatest menaces to the stability of his throne, which henceforth should owe its strength to the weakness of those it governed.  They, as all the world knows, are a peaceful Christian people, and it was against them that Abdul Hamid directed the policy which he had tested in Europe.  The instruments he employed to put it in force were the Kurds, a turbulent shepherd race marching with and mixed up among the Armenians.  By this means he had the excuse ready that these massacres were local disturbances among remote and insubordinate tribes, one of whom, however, the Kurds, he armed with modern rifles and caused to be instructed in some elementary military training.  Their task was to murder Armenians, their pay was the privilege to rape their girls and their women, and to rob the houses of the men they had killed.  The Armenians resisted with at first some small success, upon which Abdul Hamid reinforced the Kurds with regular troops, and caused it to be proclaimed that this was a war of Moslems against the infidel, a Holy War.  Moslem fanaticism, ever smouldering and ready to burst into flames, blazed high, and a fury of massacres broke forth against all Armenians, east and west, north and south.  The streets of Constantinople ran with their blood, and before Abdul Hamid was obliged by foreign civilised Powers to stop those holocausts, he had so decimated the race that not for at least a generation would they conceivably be a menace again even to that zealous guardian of the supremacy in its own dominions of the Ottoman power.  Very unwillingly, when obliged to do so, he whistled off his bands of Kurds, and dismissed them:  unwillingly, too, he gave orders that the Armenian hunts which had so pleasantly diverted the sportsmen of Constantinople, must be abandoned:  then was decreed a ‘close time’ for Armenians, the shooting season was over.  There is no exaggeration in this:  eye-witnesses have recorded how at the close of the business day in Constantinople, shooting parties used literally to go out, and beat the coverts of tenement houses for Armenians, of whom there were at that time in Constantinople some 150,000.  But when Abdul Hamid had finished his sport, I do not think more than 80,000 at the most survived.  These were saved by the protests of Europe, and perhaps by the knowledge that if all the Armenians were killed, there could never be any more shooting.  The Kurds also had lost a considerable number of men, and that was far from displeasing to the yellow-faced butcher of Yildiz.  A little blood-letting among those turbulent Kurds was not at all a bad thing.