deputation of Armenian leaders in an upper room of the Yenidje railway station, and M. Franklin-Bouillon reached Yenidje later in the day from Angora to repeat their re-assurances. On November ber 26, they motored to Mersina where some 40,000 Armenians were waiting for ships and met a deputation of 100 Armenian notables in the Government building. On November 29, M. Franklin-Bouillon returned to Mersina alone and held a final conference with the Armenians. Since they had once been Ottoman subjects, the Turkish Government had a probable right in law to forbid their departure from Turkish soil, but it had become clear that no guarantees it could offer would persuade them to remain voluntarily and the Government refrained from keeping them involuntarily. Most of them went to Syria to live on the charity of the Near East Relief at Alexandretta, only a few miles away, and their abandoned homes in Cilicia were put into the hands of a Turkish committee appointed by Hamid Bey to be kept for them for a year's time. Most of Cilicia was in a devastated condition and there was an appalling amount of work to be done in repairing the ravages of war, but the bulk of the Armenians settled down to live in idleness on American charity at the old Alexandretta barracks.
It may be that some means will yet be discovered of re-writing ten centuries of history in the eastern provinces and five centuries in Cilicia; it may be that some way will yet be opened of transferring the semi-autonomy of the old Ermeni community from a religious to a territorial basis, but with all possible good will, the discovery of it or of the
