had acted, or, I should rather say, had been compelled to act, differently. Thus, at Angora, out of 6,000, as many as 4,000 families had seceded from the Monophysite Armenian body; nevertheless, the minority retained possession of the seven churches in that town, and the dissenters were obliged to worship in a chapel of their own building. At Tocât, where similar proselytism has taken place, the seceders were unable to make good their claim to a single church. At Diarbekir, some years ago, the whole Greek community of the town became Romanists. The Greek Patriarch instituted proceedings against them for keeping possession, and succeeded in forcing them to give up the church which they had retained after their change of creed.
Why, then, it may be asked, were the Jacobites treated with such injustice? The reason is evident, and serves to disclose somewhat of those foreign machinations which exert so powerful an influence in such matters on the councils of the Porte. The Greek rayahs being of the same creed with the Russians, look up to that power for its support, and the out-spreading wing of the great eagle of the north casts its protecting shadow over the spiritual interests of its co-religionists. And since so goodly a portion of Upper Armenia was meekly ceded to the empire of the Tsar by the treaty of Unkiar Skelessi; and the Catholicos, or Patriarch of the Armenians, became a subject of the Father of All the Russias, those also among the subjects of the Porte who acknowledge obedience to him come in for a share of the same powerful aid. The notoriety of this foreign influence, and the pace with which it was advancing, may be gathered from the following circumstance.
Being one day at the Armenian patriarchate in Constantinople, the collector of the subscriptions for the Turkish Government Gazette called for the amount due from the Armenian subscribers. A long altercation took place between him and an official, who acted as agent for the payment of the money, the latter declaring that he would not disburse anything on account of those who had been absent the whole or part of the past year. On inquiry it turned out, that many of the opulent Armenians were in the habit of taking a trip to Odessa, or to some other Russian town, and after residing there a year or more, received a passport as Russian subjects, and returned
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