In the following month, July, 1878, the Congress of the Great Powers met in Berlin, to adjust the differences and make a smaller map for Turkey both in Europe and Asia. The indefatigable Patriarch, Bishop Nerses, sent a special deputation[106] to Berlin to petition the Congress for a Christian governor over Armenia, like that of Lebanon since 1861, and the European Powers themselves constituting the guardians of the Christian Armenians. The Congress of Berlin saw at once the justice and moderation of the Armenian request, and as a result we have the sixty-first Article of the Treaty of Berlin. But with an inexplicable stupidity, and with a criminal credulity, this Congress left the whole matter in the hands of the Turkish government, as if that wicked power was ever ready and willing to do what is right and proper, and the European Powers were to take the simple attitude of “watching over their [reforms] application.” The Sixty-first article runs: “The sublime Porte engages to realize without delay those ameliorations and reforms which local needs require in the provinces inhabited by the Armenians, and guarantee their security against the Circassians and Kurds. It undertakes to make known from time to time, the measures taken with this object to the powers who will watch over their application.” It is not enough to say that the Turkish government has failed to introduce necessary reforms, to ameliorate the condition of the Christians, or protect them from the atrocities of the Kurds, Circassians, and the Turks, since the signing of the Treaty of Berlin, for it has done more. It has determined, one way or the other, gradually to decimate and finally to exterminate the entire Armenian population in the empire. The facts of the history of the last thirty-five years bear out this assertion. It was only two years after the signing of the Treaty of Berlin and England’s contract with Turkey that “the disturbances among the Kurds assumed a more general character in September (1880), when new troubles were reported in the district south of New Bajazid in the Sanjak of Mush, and in other parts of the same region. Incendiary proclamations were addressed to the Armenians by the insurgent chiefs, and the governor-general of Van applied to Constantinople for reinforcements but was answered that none could be spared. On the 20th of September the Kurds had destroyed thirteen Armenian villages.”