Note 49 — Front matter (continued 7)

I must ask my readers to believe that I crossed the Turkish frontier without any knowledge of or interest in the "Armenian Question;" that so far from having any special liking for the Armenians I had rather a prejudice against them; that I was in ignorance of the "Erzerum troubles" of June 1890, and of yet more recent complications, and that the sole object of my journey by a route seldom traversed by Europeans from Urmi to Van was to visit the Patriarch of the Nestorians and the Kochanes station of the Archbishop of Canterbury's Assyrian Church Mission, and that afterwards I travelled to Erzerum viâ Bitlis only to visit the American missionaries there. So far as I know, I entered Turkey as a perfectly neutral and impartial observer, and without any special interest in its Christian populations, and it is only the "inexorable logic of facts" which has convinced me of their wrongs and claims.