"Although we have cherished strong prejudice against your mission work among us, recent events have proved that our Protestant brethren are one with us, and have shared fully our anxieties and our perils. You have labored through them to promote among us the peace and prosperity of the gospel. It is not your fault that one result of their teaching and example has been to excite our masters against us. The Turkish government dreads and dislikes nothing so much as the ideas of progress which you have sent us." VIII. THE ARMENIANS OF TO-DAY. There are about five millions of Armenians in the world at present: three millions in the Turkish Empire, a million and a half in Russian Armenia, and half a million more scattered through Persia, India, and Burmah, Egypt, Europe (there are two or three hundred thousand in the Austrian Empire), and America. There are poor and ignorant people among them, as among every people; the majority, however, are (or were before the late horrors) well off, and many of them rich, educated, refined, and, in a word, modern Christian people. Of all the impudent inversions of truth ever perpetrated, the most outrageously impudent and shamelessly the exact contrary of fact is the assertion of Mavroyeni Bey, the Turkish minister at Washington, that the case of the Turks against the Armenians is like that of the whites against the Indians in this country; that the American whites must be allowed to keep the Indians down, and the Turks must be allowed to keep the Armenians down. If the Indians possessed all the money, all the intelligence, all the cultivation, and all the morals in America, and the whites were a mob of ignorant, cruel, lustful ruffians holding them down by the organized power of the sword, the comparison would be just. As it is, the Turks correspond fairly enough with the Indians, and the Armenians to the whites, in every other respect than military power. Does a Turk--a true Turk--ever write a book? Does he ever publish a newspaper, or read one? Does he ever build a church, or pay attention to the moral precepts taught in one? Does he ever found or manage a business, or even an estate? In a word, does he have any more intellectual, moral, or business part in the life of modern civilization than a Hottentot or a Matabele? And do not the Armenians do and have all these things? Are they not in the stream of the same kind of cultivated Christian life led by Americans? Nowhere else on earth, but in the Turkish Empire, can one find millions of gentlemen and ladies and civilized modern citizens ruled over, oppressed, and massacred in hundreds of thousands by a gang of mediaeval Asiatic barbarians, not advanced from the time of Timour or Jenghiz Khan. It is the greatest anachronism and monstrosity of modern times.