3. By the deep-rooted faith and personal convictions of tens of thousands who believe in the right of individual judgment in religion and in the supremacy of conscience enlightened by the Word of God. Fifty thousand Protestants in the Empire can be depended upon to hold their own, even were all foreign missionaries to be withdrawn.
4. By the vast body of Christian literature and the power of the journalistic press, which are inconsistent with a recoil into the domain of priestly tyranny and the stifling of the human conscience.
Protestantism as a principle is steadily growing in every sect in the Empire. The Ark of God is safe in this land. Let us work on in patience and good cheer, with gratitude and unquestioning faith.
Turkish Armenia, the northwestern division of Kurdestan, is a great plateau of nearly sixty thousand square miles, bounded on the north by the Russian frontier, by Persia on the east, the plains of Mesopotamia on the west, and Asia Minor on the south. There are in all, at the present time, about four million Armenians on the globe, of whom little more than half are in Turkey, and the rest in Russia, Persia, other Asiatic countries, Europe and America. In Armenia--the name and geographical existence of which are not recognized in Turkey--there are probably six hundred thousand native Armenians, or one-fourth of the whole number that are scattered throughout the Porte's dominions. The climate is temperate and bracing. Facilities for travel and transportation are exceedingly meagre, and all the methods employed by the natives are unusually primitive. "Valis," or municipal governors, are appointed by the government at Constantinople to administer the laws, and none but Moslems hold official positions.
Among the population are found many races, including Turks, Kurds, Russians, Circassians, and Jews, besides native Armenians. Fully one-half the people are Mohammedan. The Kurds lead a pastoral and predatory life, dwelling in mountain villages over the entire region. Their number is uncertain, but it is estimated that in the villages of Erzeroum, Van and Bitlis there are not less than six hundred thousand. Some of these tribes are migratory, like the Bedouins of Syria. Almost all are warlike, and many have degenerated into lawless brigands. For centuries they have made serfs of the Christians, trampling them under foot at every opportunity, and extending to them no toleration whatsoever. These rude mountaineers delight in bloodshed and pillage, and it was their oppression of the Armenian villagers which precipitated the distress in Sassoun, Moush, Bitlis, and the surrounding country. The Kurdish costumes are picturesque, and nearly all the tribesmen are magnificent horsemen. The government at Constantinople organized them as a military force, and bestowed the name "Hamidieh" on their cavalry regiments, but their spirit, like that of the wild Arab, the Cossack, or the North American Indian, is one that scarcely brooks the restraints of military discipline. They were always formidably armed, and weapons in the hands of such a war-loving race were an incentive to disturbance and outrage. They spread universal terror among the Armenians by their cruelty and frightful excesses for many centuries, but it was reserved for our own time to witness the exhibition of barbarism on their part that filled Europe and America with horror.