Note 6 — Chapter XXII · STATISTICAL AND POLITICAL

The administration by Russia of the north-eastern half of Armenia has been occupied with races whose more recent political history consists in their passage from one domination to another; and the presence of discontent in certain quarters may be regarded as the inevitable outcome of the change. The Mussulman adherents of the old Turkish dominion share with their neighbours of Turkish origin the humiliation of a fallen state; and their Turkish sympathies and connections, while they excite the suspicions of the Russian Government, dispose them to yield to the lightest pressure, and to cross the border into Turkish soil.6 The Armenians, who have been a mainstay to Russia both in her Persian and in her Turkish wars, whose lands were swept by the tide of battle, and who can recall the memory of conflicts which extended even to the walls of their sanctuary, the cloister of Edgmiatsin, are inclined to temper their sentiments of gratitude with the consciousness of the services which they rendered—services which many among them may be disposed to consider have only resulted in the imposition of a fresh and more burdensome yoke. North of the tableland the Georgian races, whose kingdom, harassed by Mohammedan peoples, was driven to seek assistance outside, have not yet forgotten the disappointment of the hope which many among them had cherished, that Russian intervention might assume the form of a protectorate rather than of a complete absorption of the Georgian element into the Russian State. But such regrets and disillusionments are but the familiar sequel to the constitution of empire upon a new soil; and human nature under such circumstances is more prone to count the loss than to recognise the gain. Over twenty years have now elapsed since Russia completed her subjugation of the Caucasus, whose peoples, untamed for so long a period, menaced the base of her advance; order and peace have been given to the country, and life and property are safe. Georgian children are no longer sold into slavery, and a middle class is forming amongst that people, whose traditional relation to one another was that of noble and serf. An experienced traveller, who visited the Armenian provinces in 1868, and passed through the more fertile regions of the country between Kars and Kagyzman, has left on record a striking picture of the misery of those Mussulman times. He was crossing the district of Shuragel, the ancient Shirak of the Armenians; and he speaks of deserted towns and villages, of Armenian peasants who clung to their ruined homes with a pertinacity of affection which neither poverty nor oppression could subdue, of the dispossession of the Christians by the Turkish Beys, and of the exactions and forays of the Kurds, which had curtailed agriculture and stifled industry, and had reduced both to the extreme limit on which human life is able to subsist.7 If, at the present time, the Armenian peasant gathers for himself the crops which he has sown, and the restless Kurd consults his safety by a sober respect for the law, it is to Russia that the people owe this deliverance from the license and anarchy of former years.