and probably absolutely, depopulated of its Armenian inhabitants.  Such as survive, apart from the women whose lives were spared on their professing Islamism and entering Turkish harems, have escaped beyond the Russian frontier, and are believed to number about a quarter of a million.  In the meantime their homes have partly been destroyed and partly occupied by mouhadjirs from Thrace, and by the Kurds who were largely instrumental in butchering them.  Their lands have been appropriated haphazardly, by, any who laid hands on them.

Here the problem is of no great difficulty.  The robber-tenants must be evicted, and the remnant of the Armenians repatriated.  Without exception they escaped into Trans-Caucasia from villages and districts near the frontier, else they could never have escaped from the pursuing Turks and Kurds.  Naturally, this remnant of a people will not nearly suffice to fill their entire province, but in order to satisfy the claims of justice at all adequately, the whole district of Armenia, as Armenia was known before its people were exterminated, must be amputated by a clean cut out of the Ottoman Empire and placed, in an autonomous condition in a new protected province, which will include all the vilayets of Armenia.

There is no doubt about a prosperous future for Armenia if this is done, and to do less than this would be to fail signally as regards the solemn promise made by the Allies when they stated to President Wilson their aims in the war.  The Armenians have ever been a thrifty and industrious people, possessed of an inherent vitality which has withstood centuries of fiendish oppression.  With facilities given them for their re-settlement, and with foreign protection to establish them, they will, beyond question, more than hold their own against the Kurds.  As a nation they are, as we have seen, partly agricultural in their pursuits; but a considerable proportion of them (and these the more intelligent) are men of business, merchants, doctors, educationalists, and gravitate to towns.  Constantinople, as we shall see, will be open to them again, where lately they numbered nearly as many as the entire remnant of their nation numbers now; so, too, will be the cities of Syria, of Palestine, and of Mesopotamia in the New Turkey which we are attempting to sketch.  They will probably not care to settle in the towns and districts that will remain in the hands of their late oppressors and murderers.

In the work of their repatriation none will be more eager to help than the American missionaries, who, at the time of the last massacre, as so often before, showed themselves so nobly disregardant of all personal danger and risk in doing their utmost for their murdered flock, and who have explicitly declared their intention of resuming their work.  With regard to the eviction of Kurds that will be necessary, it must be remembered that the Kurd is a trespasser on the plains and towns of Armenia, and properly belongs to the mountains from which he was encouraged to descend by the Turks for purposes of massacre.  Out of those towns and plains he must go, either into the mountains of Armenia from whence he came, or over the frontier of Armenia into the New Turkey presently to be defined.  He must, in fact, be deported, though not in the manner of the deportations at which he himself so often assisted.