the strong and preeminent ability of that race. He incurs the penalty which attaches among backward races to the banker, the middleman, and the creditor. Unjust as it may be, the sentiment regarding him is expressed by this saying current in the Near East: "The Armenian is never legally in the wrong; never morally in the right." Even the American missionary, who in so many instances has risked his life for his Armenian charges, does not, as a rule, personally like the Armenian as well as he does the more genial but indolent and pleasure-loving Turk. The Armenian is not guiltless of blood himself; his memory is long, and reprisals are due and will doubtless be hade if opportunity offers. Racially allied to the wild Aryan Kurd, he is cordially hated by the latter. Kurds appealed to this mission, with tears in their eyes, to protect them from Armenians who had driven them from their villages, appealing to be allowed to go back to their homes for protection against the rigorous winter now rapidly approaching on the high interior plateau. The Kurds claim that many of their people were massacred under the most cruel circumstances by Armenian irregulars accompanying the Russian Bolshevists when the Russian Army went to pieces after the collapse of the Empire.

Similar claim is made by the people of Erzerum, who point to burned buildings in which hundreds of Turks perished, and by the authorities of Hassan-Kala, who give the number of villages destroyed by the Armenians in their great plain as forty-three. According to British Consul Stevens, at Batum, these statements were verified by a commission which examined into the allegations and on which Armenians had a representation. In Baku the massacre of 2,000 Azarbaijanese by Armenians in March, 1918, was followed by the killing of 4,000 Armenians by Azarbaijanese in November of the same year. From the standpoint of this mission the capacity of the Armenian to govern himself is something to be tested under supervision. With that still in doubt the possibility of an Armenian minority being given authority over a Moslem majority against whom its hearts are filled with rancor for centuries of tyranny, may well justify apprehension. There are very many who believe that the best elements of the Armenian race have perished. It is believed that with the reestablishment of order in their native country many of those who have emigrated to other countries will return. That, however, can only come with time, and even then it is doubted if many of the

wealthy and influential Armenians long domiciled in happier lands will return to their somewhat primitive ancient home, even though such absentees have raised their voices most loudly for an autonomous Armenia. Certainly with arbitrary boundaries on the Anatolia side determined only by Armenian wishes, expediency, tradition, or even verified historical claims of former occupation, without regard to the present population, the mandatory powers for both Anatolia and Armenia should inaugurate government by placing a cordon of trustworthy foreign soldiers from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. With a single power in control of both peoples and boundaries unannounced except as they have hitherto existed, such difficulties would not arise. Against such combination of authority and postponement of delimitation of boundaries is to be weighed the unchangeable belief of many that the Turk at the end of his tutelage will still be the Turk, bloodthirsty, unregenerate, and revengeful, and that it is unthinkable that Armenia shall ever again form part of a country which may be governed by him; that the sufferings of centuries should now be terminated by definite and permanent separation of Armenia from Turkey, and that this plan seems to contemplate a tutelage of indefinite length. To this the reply is that the Armenian should have no fear to submit his case to the League of Nations-the court of the world-and that he must in the meantime prove his capacity not only to govern himself but others, and that at the behest of the great powers a plebiscite could be had and the mandatory at any time be terminated by detachment of his territory from Anatolia as well as now and with much greater safety to him and convenience to his benefactors.

The conclusion of the American military mission to Armenia is that the remedy for the existing conditions in Armenia and the Transcaucasus is a mandatory control to be exercised by a single great power. The Armenian question can not be settled in Armenia. It can not be finally settled without answering two questions:

What is to be done with Turkey?

What is Russia going to do?

Pending the ultimate settlement of these questions the mission believes that, for reasons set forth, the power which takes a mandate for Armenia should also exercise a mandate for Anatolia, Roumelia, Constantinople, and Transcaucasia; the boundaries of

the Turkish vilayets of Armenia and Anatolia and the interior boundaries of Russian Armenia, Georgia and Azarbaijan to remain substantially as they are for the present. The divisions of such mandate are an administrative detail to be worked out by the mandatory power. Good administration indicates that there should be some intermediate authority between the Provinces and the capital. A natural subdivision of such a mandate as has been indicated would probably be: Roumelia, city of Constantinople (federal district), Anatolia, Armenia, district of Transcaucasia (less Russian Armenia).

The inclusion of the whole Turkish Empire under the government of a single mandatory would be simpler and proportionately more economical than to divide it. A plebiscite fairly taken would in all probability ask for an American mandate throughout the Empire. Syria and Mesopotamia, however, not being considered essential to the settlement of the Armenian question or as being the field for possible American responsibilities and interests in the Near East as contemplated in the instructions to the mission, because actually occupied by France and Great Britain at this time, have been considered by us as excluded from our considerations, as is for a similar reason Arabia. In its belief that the Armenian problem is only to be solved by a mandatory which should include also Constantinople, Anatolia, Turkish Armenia, and the Transcaucasus, the mission has the concurrence of many Americans whose views by reason of long residence in the Near East are entitled to great weight. Such Americans are practically a unit in believing that the problems of Armenia, Anatolia, Constantinople and Transcaucasia must be considered as an inseparable whole.

The mission has a strong conviction that the nation which may be induced by its colleagues to undertake this mandate should be one prepared to steadfastly carry out a continuity of policy for at least a generation, and to send only its most gifted sons to leadership in the work without regard to political affiliations. Only on the certainty of continuity of a nonpartisan policy would the best men forsake their careers in their own country to take up the burdens in these eastern lands. No disinterested nation would undertake such a mandatory except from a strong sense of altruism and international duty to the peace of the world in this breeding place of wars and at the unanimous wish of other parties to the covenant of the League of Nations.

No duty of modern times would be undertaken under so fierce a glare of publicity. Such nation would hold the center of the international stage with the spotlight from every foreign office and from every church steeple in the world focussed upon it. No nation could afford to fail, or to withdraw when once committed to this most serious and difficult problem growing out of the Great War. No nation incapable of united and nonpartisan action for a long period should undertake it.

THE CONDITIONS AND PROBLEMS INVOLVED IN A MANDATE FOR TURKEY AND TRANSCAUCASIA

This report has heretofore endeavored to consider the conditions and questions of which it treats in the abstract sense applicable to any nation which might be induced to assume the task of a practical regeneration of this region. Its interest for our country, however, lies in the possibility that the United States may be called upon by the world to undertake the task, and the necessity, therefore, of knowing what it would mean for America. The problems for the United States would not be identical with those of any other nation which might undertake it. A not too sympathetic Old World, without pretensions to altruism or too much devotion to ideals, will expect of America in the Near East the same lofty standards shown in Cuba and the Philippines—the development of peoples rather than of material resources and commerce. Distance, our time-honored detachment from the affairs of the Old World, our innocence from participation in the intrigues which have hitherto characterized intercourse with the Turk, our freedom from bias through the necessity of considering Moslem public opinion in other parts of the world, and the fact that we have no financial interest in the great foreign debt of the Ottoman Empire, give America a viewpoint and an advantage in approaching the situation that are enjoyed by no other great power.

A great part of the work of the mission has been devoted to a consideration of the situation as it would affect our own country should it be invited to assume a mandate in the Near East. The problem as a whole has been kept in mind while individual members of the mission have made special inquiry into different matters of which knowledge is necessary to reach an intelligent appreciation of the difficulties to be solved in this region. Each of these studies constitutes a unit on the subject with which it

deals, too important to justify the risk of an attempt at epitomizing for this report. They are therefore submitted as appendices, as follows:

A. Political Factors and Problems, by Capt. Stanley K. Hornbeck, Ordnance Department, United States Army.

B. Government in Turkey and Transcaucasia, by Lieut. Col. Jasper Y. Brinton, judge advocate, United States Army.

C. Public and Private Finance of Turkey and Transcaucasia, by Prof. W. W. Cumberland.

D. Commerce and Industry in Turkey and Transcaucasia, by Trade Commissioner Eliot Grinnell Mears.

E. Public Health and Sanitation, by Col. Henry Beeuwkes, Medical Corps, United States Army.

F. Population; Industrial and Other Qualities; Maintenance, by Lieut. Col. John Price Jackson, Engineers, United States Army.

G. Climate, Natural Resources, Animal Industry, and Agriculture, by Lieut. Col. E. Bowditch, Infantry, United States Army.

H. Geography, Mining, and Boundaries, by Maj. Lawrence Martin, General Staff, United States Army.

I. The Press of Turkey and Transcaucasia, by Maj. Harold W. Clark, Infantry, United States Army.

J. The Military Problem of a Mandatory, by Brig. Gen. George Van Horn Moseley, General Staff, United States Army.

K. Transport and Communications in Asia Minor and the Transcaucasus, by William B. Poland, engineer member of the mission. L. Bibliography.

THE MILITARY PROBLEM

Our country has so recently sent its young manhood to war overseas and the heart of the Nation is so sensitive to any enterprise which calls for its sons to serve as soldiers in distant lands that the greatest interest attaches to the military problem involved in any mandate to which our people may ever give consideration.

The immediate problems which would lie before the Army and Navy of a mandatory power in Turkey and Transcaucasia are: (a) The suppression of any disorder attendant upon withdrawal of occupying troops and the initiation of the government. (b) The maintenance of order until a constabulary could be organized for the rural police of the mandatory region.

(c) To help organize and train a native constabulary.

(d) To constitute a reserve for moral effect, for possible actual use in supplementing the local constabulary in case of emergency,