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

204 THE ARMENIANS

merit is unpopular among the majority of that
class of Armenians, for Turkey is the paradise of
the rich unscrupulous man, who does not shrink
from using the power of the purse.

Further, that is not the class of Armenians
which has given rise to the recent Imperial policy
of massacre. None know better than the palace
officials that their most useful, nay, their indis-
pensable instruments in misgoverning the Empire,
have always been found in that class and in a
corresponding class of Phanariote Greeks. It is
among the poor Mohammedan peasantry that the
Armenian capitalists are hated ; and the massacres
do not originate from the peasants. Generally
speaking, that class of Armenians has suffered
from the massacres only so far as it was necessary
to appeal to the greed and envy of the Moham-
medan city mob in order to rouse them to the
pitch of massacre.

But that class of the Armenians cannot fairly
be taken, though it often is taken, as fair specimens
of the Armenian race. It is not the natural growth
of the Armenian qualities and religion, it is the
necessary outcome of eight centuries of Turkish
rule. To appreciate what Turkish rule is, we
must not go to travellers in recent years, who have
seen only the condition of central and western
Anatolia—roughly speaking, Asia Minor west of