about 150,000 were in the province of Adarbaijan, and there were smaller bodies of them in Austria and India.  The remainder, some 2,500,000, were spread over Armenia, over the villages and towns of Turkey, notably the eastern edge of the Cilician uplands, while in Constantinople itself there were certainly not less than 150,000, and probably as many as 200,000.  To-day, the male portion of the Armenian race in the Ottoman Empire has practically ceased to exist:  a quarter of a million men and women escaped over the Russian frontier, five thousand escaped to Egypt, and there are a few thousand women and girls (it is impossible to ascertain the exact number) in Turkish harems.  Turkism, as administered by Abdul Hamid first, then, far more efficiently, by Enver Pasha, and Talaat Bey, has solved the Armenian question.

The history of its solution falls under two heads, of which the first concerns the manner in which it was solved in Armenia itself, where the population was almost exclusively Armenian, both in towns and in the country.  Here the eastern and north-eastern frontiers of Turkey, across which lie the province of Russian Trans-Caucasia and Persia, pass through the middle of districts peopled by men of Armenian blood, and when, in the autumn of 1914, the Turks made their entry into the European War, their eastern armies, operating against Russia, found themselves confronted by troops among whom were many Armenians, while in their advance into the Persian province of Adarbaijan, there were in the ranks of their opponents, Armenians and Syriac Christians.  They advanced in fact, in the first weeks of the war, into a country largely peopled with men of the same blood as those on their own side of the frontier.  Though the edict had not yet come from Constantinople for the massacre of the Armenians (Talaat Bey did not complete his arrangements till the following April), the slaughter of them began then, first in the advance of the Turkish armies, and following on that movement, which lasted but a few weeks, in their subsequent retreat before the Russians.  All villages through which the Turkish armies passed were plundered and burned, all the inhabitants on whom the Turks could lay their hands were killed.  Sometimes women and children were given to the Kurds, who formed bands of irregular troops in conjunction with the Turkish army, and these were outraged before they were slaughtered.  A price was put on every Christian head, and in the Turkish retreat the corpses were thrust into the wells in order to pollute them.  The excuse for this, as given by German apologists (not apologists, perhaps, so much as supporters and adherents of the policy), was that since behind the Turkish lines the country was populated by a race of the same blood as that through which they advanced, and then retreated, extermination was necessary in order to prevent or to punish treachery and collusion.  But I have been nowhere able to find that there were instances of such, nor that the Turks put forward that excuse themselves.  Indeed it would have been an unnecessary explanation, for but a few months after the opening of the war, Talaat Bey’s plans were complete, and the extermination of Armenians hundreds of miles from any sphere of military operations rendered it needless to say anything about it, or to invent instances of treachery if there were actually none to hand.