This is apparent to the superficial observer. The scheme of reforms devolved civil officers, judgeships, and police participation on Mohammedans and non-Mohammedans in the six provinces proportionately. This, while simple justice, was a bitter pill to the Mohammedans, who had ruled the Christians with a rod of iron for five hundred years. All that was needed to make the scheme of reforms inoperative was to alter the proportion of Christians to Mohammedans. This policy was at once relentlessly and thoroughly executed. The number of the Armenians has been diminished, first by killing at a single blow those most capable of taking a part in any scheme of reconstruction, and secondly by compelling the survivors to die of starvation, exposure, and sickness, or to become Moslems. It is the very essence of Mohammedanism that the "ghiavour" has no right to live, save in subjection. The abortive scheme of Europe insisting on the rights of Armenians as men, has enraged the Moslems against them. The arrogant and non-progressive Turks know that in a fair and equal race the Christians will outstrip them in every department of business and industry, and they see in any fair scheme of reforms the handwriting on the wall for themselves. If the scheme of reforms had applied to regions where Greeks predominate, the latter would have been killed and robbed as readily as the Armenians have been. Are the Greek massacres of 1822 forgotten, when 50,000 were killed, or the slaughter of 12,000 Maronites and Syrians in 1860, and of 15,000 Bulgarians in 1876? VII. Turkish Official Reports. The refinement of cruelty appears in this, that the Turkish government has attempted to cover up its hideous policy by the most colossal lying and hypocrisy. It is true that on Sept. 30, 1895, some hot-headed young Armenians, contrary to the entreaties of the Armenian patriarch and the orders of the police, attempted to take a well-worded petition to the Grand Vezir, according to a time-honored custom. It is also true that the oppressed mountaineers of Zeitoon drove out a small garrison of Turkish soldiers, whom, however, they treated with humanity; it is likewise true that in various places individual Armenians, in despair, have advocated violent methods. But the universal testimony of impartial foreign eye-witnesses is that, with the above exceptions, the Armenians have given no provocation, and that almost, if not quite, all the telegrams purporting to come from the provincial authorities accusing the Armenians with provoking the massacres, are sheer fabrications of names and dates. If the Armenians made attacks, where are the Turkish dead?