Page:Islam, Turkey, and Armenia, and How They Happened.djvu/105

Rh for each work in the house—one to look after the horses, and sometimes with subordinates under his command, one to prepare coffee, another to follow him and carry his four or five-foot-long pipe, one to tell hideous stories to entertain him and his guests, another to lead him in his five daily prayers, one to carry his child (on the shoulder, and teach him how to swear), one to oversee the crops, another to keep their record, and one to bring them in, etc.—ten, twenty or fifty, gathered in the house and in the harem depend upon him for their extravagant living. The endless flow of beggars, flatterers, fortune-tellers, good dreamers about the chief lady of the harem, guests, untimely callers and their horses, donkeys and camels—all these idle and gluttonous men and women cannot be supported by smoking in the corner of the house, or by hearing and telling stories about houris (the girls of paradise). There must be a constant source of supply. It is the poor Armenian's destiny to be the rayah, the pasture of this cursed flock. They are Turks' and Kurds' cornfields for eating, for selling, for trampling, and for burning. Who wants to give up such a support and laborers as the Armenians? It is true, occasionally they thin them out by the sword and reduce to poverty the remainder, but they are not so unwise as to exterminate them and be obliged to work themselves.

The Turk could not and can not exist without his non-Moslem subjects, and he is well aware of it.