Ramsay, William Mitchell: Impressions of Turkey during twelve years' wanderings (London, 1897)

156 PAST AND PRESENT

planned for the benefit of Russia and Germany is
a just punishment for the crime of supporting the
Bulgarian massacres, and the duplicity of the
Cyprus Convention.

Will the Sultan's policy be successful ? Will the
revival of Mohammedanism be permanent in Asia
Minor ? So far as the centre and west is concerned,
it cannot be. The Moslems are dying out there.
Even where the Greeks have not begun to settle,
the Turks are diminishing in numbers owing
to conscription, misgovernment, and moral causes,
on which I will not enter, because I have avoided
studying or observing them. They have no
heart. They are in the grip of the railways, and
under the influence of Europe. In the eastern
regions it may be different for a time. The Mo-
hammedan revival has been far more carefully
propagated in those lands, and for the moment it
is successful by the usual Turkish method. As it
was in Scio in 1821 and in Syria in i860, so it is
there at the present time, but on a vastly greater
scale,—the signs of western spirit, western educa-
tion and aspirations after the elementary rights of
freedom alarmed the Turks, and they have set to
work, after long preparation and on a carefully
deliberated plan, to crush the hostile western spirit
by general and indiscriminate massacre. The
Armenians will in all probability be exterminated,