CURRENT LITERATURE.
Round about Armenia. By E. A. Brayley Hodgetts. (Sampson Low, Marston, and Co.)—There are some terrible things in Mr. 'Hodgett's Armenia, and even if we allow him to have a very strong bias, he has collected a most damaging series of organised cruelties against "The Great Assassin." The quantity of circum- stantial evidence that has accumulated as to the long-cherished -Intention of Abd-ul-Hamid to make an example of the Armenians is conclusive. This the Armenians are perfectly well aware of, even if they had no proofs—if we do not see the hand that strikes we know whose it is—and they do not accuse the Kurds of cruelties. The Kurds acted the part of stalking horses. After all there is nothing extraordinary in the massacres,—it is the essentially Oriental way of dealing with races that have obtained the predominance in wealth or trade in empires that only exist by the sword. We treated the Jews in the same fashion at the end of the twelfth century, only of course it is a long time ago,— seven hundred years. It is absurd to suppose that the Osmanli will ever govern by other methods ; they do not comprehend any other, nor would the Koran allow them to do so. It is the same with other Mahommedan Empires. The Mogul, the Moorish, and the Turkish Empires have gone, and will go, from the same cause, —internal corruption. The Osmanli dynasty will not, of course, -nave much longer to govern in; these repeated insurrections have -preceded the fall of all empires. Mr. Hodgetts's book is full of all sorts of signs of the approaching catastrophe, and though it is impossible to say positively that the Armenians will themselves strike the fatal blow, there is no reason why they should not -realise Byron's hint to "hereditary bondsmen," for they are by no means worms; some of the best soldiers the Russians have are Armenians. Russia is in the position of the man who watches a dog-fight, giving a sly kick occasionally to enrage the combatants. The more muddle the better for her, only the pity of it is that the Russians hate the Armenians as much as the Turks do, from terhat Mr. Hodgetts says.
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