The Young Turks’ plan to exterminate the Armenian race was cunningly complete from the beginning to the end. The three different stages or steps by which they hoped to finish the work are now clear. In the first stage, knowing that the able-bodied men would survive the horrors of deportation, or at least most of them would, so in order to hasten the end, they were massacred; in the second stage, they were sure that delicate women and children could not stand the horrors of deportation on foot over the rugged mountains and deep valleys under the burning sun, half naked, and without food and water, so they consigned the largest number of the Armenians to such a process of death and destruction. This procedure, moreover, would give to their representatives, whether German or Turkish, at the courts of the neutral powers, the right to say that the Turks are not killing the women and children. Yet they were not unmindful of the possibility of their disappointment by the survival of some even from this process of death. Thus we have the third stage for the unfortunate survivors. These survivors, mostly women and children, make up the “agricultural colonies.” The annihilation of the Armenian race being the aim of the government, we must surely expect the selection of such places as will accomplish their purpose. We, unfortunately, do not fail in this expectation. One such called Sultanieh, in the province of Konia, is a veritable desert, south of _Tuz Gul_ (Salt Lake). At this place, “a thousand families of Armenian townspeople, assembled by weary marches from every quarter, were given a taste of the wilderness, a thousand families, and only fifty grown men among them to provide for the needs of this helpless flock of women, children and invalids flung thus suddenly upon their own resources, in an environment as abnormal to them as it would be to the middle-class population of any town in England or France.” Having established this “agricultural colony” on the waste, the government was content, and troubled itself about its colonies no more.