No one of course speaks all the languages; but no one can get on at all comfortably without speaking a minimum of two. That number will probably enable him at least to find an interpreter in most of the villages which favour the four remaining tongues.
The nationalities are as diverse as the languages, and are interwoven together in the most bewildering entanglement; not by separate districts dovetailed into one another like the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle, but by tiny fragmentary communities dispersed like different grains shaken up vigorously in a bag. The village is the largest unit; and where one village is Syrian, the next may be Kurdish, the next Armenian, the next Yezidi; all out of sympathy with each other and all resolutely refusing to mix. Here and there in the medley one may find occasionally a specimen which has no affinity whatever with any neighbouring nationality. Membij, for example, is a village of Circassians, fugitives from the Russian occupation who were given an asylum here by the Sultan Abdul Hamid. We have sometimes wondered whether this extraordinary mixture may not be the fruit of the policy adopted by the ancient Assyrians, who were wont to disperse their captive nations through all the length and breadth of their domain; but the same thing is seen in the European provinces of Turkey where Assyrians and Persians never penetrated, and where Serbs, Bulgars, Greeks and Roumanians form an equally tangled skein.
English critics talk glibly enough of Turkey being an Asiatic Power, and being capable of regenerating herself by concentrating her energies in Asia. They seem to be under the delusion that Turkey in Asia is mainly inhabited by Turks! As a matter of fact (except as aforesaid, in Anatolia) one may live for years in Asiatic Turkey without so much as meeting a single Turk. Even the official classes are largely Circassians and Arnauts; and the bulk of the population are Arabs and Armenians and Syrians and Greeks and Kurds, all of whom are profoundly disaffected and only acquiesce in Turkish rule because they will on no account support each other in usurping its place.
The problem of Asiatic Turkey, like the problem of Thrace and Macedonia, is simply that none of the component races can be trusted to govern the rest, and that all are so inextricably intermingled that it is impossible to parcel them out into distinct homogeneous States. We must own some sympathy with the Turks, the old conquering race, who once fully vindicated their hegemony. But their day is now past: their natural force abated. And though they still hold the tiller (thanks to the dissensions among their crew) they have no longer the strength to keep the ship under control. Their empire is too great for their shrunken numbers to govern, and they find themselves choked by the subject races with whom they have failed to assimilate.