form of civilization. However rigidly he may seek to confine his work within the limits of religious teaching (and I am thoroughly convinced that the overwhelming majority of missionaries have so sought to confine their work in the Ottoman Empire), it is impossible for him not to be an American and a center of American ideas. In actual practice, it proved impossible for him not to stand as a center of Westernism in an Eastern country to which the application of Western ideas necessitated the utmost caution. The Armenians among whom most of the missionaries worked, were the farthest East of all the Ottoman peoples and among the non-Moslem communities they were the last to respond to the Western lure. For centuries they have lived generally in peace under the Caliph's rule. Themselves an Eastern people, they had lived under their Eastern masters in the enjoyment of the autonomy of their community institutions. The terms under which the Ermeni community conducted its own affairs in its own way, were the only terms under which they could have enjoyed the degree of autonomy which they did enjoy, for they had a majority in no province[1] and the Western idea presupposes a majority as the first requisite of independence.
If Christian worship as it was practiced in the Ottoman Empire was ever to command the respect
- ↑ My authority for this statement is "Reconstruction in Turkey," a book published for private distribution in 1918 by the American Committee of Armenian and Syrian Relief, the predecessor of the Near East Relief. "The estimate of their (the Armenians') number in the empire before the war," says Dr. Harvey Porter of Beirut College on page 15, "ranges from 1,500,000 to 2,000,000, but they were not in a majority in any vilayet."
