“It is hardly possible to imagine to oneself the implication of such a decree [of deportation]. These [Armenians] were not savages, like the Red Indians who retired before the White man across the American continent. They were not nomadic shepherds like their barbarous neighbors the Kurds. They were people living the same life as ourselves, townspeople established in the town for generations and the chief authors of its local prosperity. They were sedentary people, doctors and lawyers and teachers, business men and artisans and shopkeepers, and they had raised solid monuments to their intelligence and industry. Costly churches and well-appointed schools. Their women were as delicate, as refined, as unused to hardships and brutality as women in Europe or the United States. In fact, they were in the closest personal touch with Western civilization, for many of the Armenian centers upon which the crime was perpetrated had been served by the American missions and colleges for at least fifty years, and were familiar with the fine men and women who directed them.”[169] The government’s determination to exterminate the Armenian race was not a sudden impulse. It was a deliberate scheme of long standing. After the overthrow of the Hamidian despotism, the Young Turks encouraged the Armenians to organize societies and even permitted them to possess firearms. Their diabolical purpose was not suspected by the trusting Armenians. But when war broke out, the Turks joined the Teutons in hopes to share the rich booty of the war. When this was not forthcoming, they bethought that the opportune moment had come to loot the Armenians, and carry out the plan of annihilation. They had not much difficulty in making out a case against these societies, saying that they were of a revolutionary character; and their possession of firearms was taken as a proof of the same. Dr. Gibbons gives in his excellent little book, “The Blackest Page of Modern History,” the following statement which was made by the Turkish Consul General in New York: “‘However much to be deplored may be these harrowing events, in the last analysis we can but say the Armenians have only themselves to blame.’ Djelal Munif Bey went on to explain that the Armenians had been planning a revolution, and were killed by the Turkish soldiers only after they had been caught ‘red-handed with arms in their hands, resisting lawful authority.’”