March 5, 1919

A long talk with Nubar Pasha (the ranking delegate of the Egyptian-Armenian contingent) today. He takes me back to the cradle of his unfortunate people. He says the Armenians are closely related to the Hittites, although he admits that some of the Arab clans in Syria claim, mistakenly of course, similar descent. I refuse to follow Nubar back to the dawn of history. There should be limits as to the research of national paternity, I insist, and finally he agrees. He maintains that the pure inhabitants of the Van plain do not know what you are driving at when you call them Armenians. They call themselves Hai and trace descent to a certain great chief, who may be mythical but who for all that is very real to them, called Haik. What we call Armenia is to them Haiistan, and the word Armenia, being of Persian origin, is most distasteful. However, Nubar is not dogmatic and is inclined to be lenient with our mistakes. He insists, however, that in the days of Herodotus western Asia was better known to the civilized world than it is today, even to our most expert geographers.

Skipping many epochs and ignoring many national vicissitudes, I bring Nubar down to date, or almost, and I am rewarded by facts that will have a bearing on the settlement of the question, if one is reached. He concedes that in many districts of Anatolia in Turkey before the war the Armenians had sizeable majorities—which were indeed before the massacres of 1896 overwhelming majorities—but that they are now minorities. “But,” he argues, “should our people lose their homes and their lands because they have—that is, so many of them—lost their lives?”

I can see, too, that this, like the Silesia problem with its crusade of Germanization, is not one that can be fairly settled by the application of our American panacea of a “free and fair election.” That would only be the case if the murdered and the exiled could come to the ballot boxes.