acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

ARMENIANS AND TURKS 43
fighting man than the average Greek, for instance.
He never stands in awe of the Greek, and never has
done so in all his history. He is fierce and bold
enough in quarrel with a Greek, and seems, indeed, to
be conscious of a moral ascendancy. But let him be
opposed by a Moslem, and straightway his confident
spirit gives place to a sort of furious despair, for
which, between one man and the other, you can see
no reason at all.
And yet this
average Armenian, when accompanied
by a European, may become aggressive to the point of
insolence in his behaviour to Moslems, and willing to
risk the most serious trouble. Such an Armenian,
serving me as a7'a6«-driver for a journey, lashed the
camels of a passing caravan, seeking to stampede
them in a spirit of bravado. And an American missionary
doctor, speaking of the same Armenian trait,
told me that once he had to gallop for life because,
on the open chaussee, his Armenian servant purposely
rode among the feet of Moslems seated by the wayside.
That this industrious and not unwarlike people
should have got so hopelessly under the Turkish
heel is chiefly due to a single infirmity of nature.
They are
prone to falling out among themselves, and
as good haters have ever been slow to lay aside personal
animosities in order to show a united front
against their common enemy. With such an unhappy
faculty for dissension, they combine one or two other
characteristics which help to make resistance to the
Turk almost futile.
Since the massacres at the close of last century
Armenians have armed in self-defence. It was the
right course, and if followed up with any reasonable
degree of unity and wisdom, would soon have
made an end of massacres. But to arm, and boast
of it ; to boast, also, of what would happen next,
and then to prove incapable of making good the
boastings, was no less than fatal. Moslems, knowing
better than any the strangely contradictory Armenian
nature, remembered the boasts, and laughed at the