For the Armenians are not lawless barbarians or brigands: nor are the Turks and Kurds the accredited torch bearers of civilization. But even if the "rôles" of the actors in this hideous drama were thus distributed, an excuse might at most be found for severity, but no pretext could be discovered for the slow torture and gradual vivisection employed by fanatic Mohammedans to end the lives of their Christian neighbors. If for instance it be expedient that Armenians should be exterminated, why chop them up piecemeal, and in the intervals of this protracted process, banter the agonized victims who are wildly calling upon God and man to put them out of pain? Why must an honest, hard workingman be torn from his bed or his fireside; forced to witness the violation of his own daughter by a band of all pitiless demons unable to rescue or help her, and then, his own turn come, have his hand cut off and stuffed into his mouth while a short sermon is being preached to him on the text: "If your God be God, why does He not succor?" at the peroration of which the other hand is hacked off, and then amid boisterous shouts of jubilation, his ears are torn from his head and his feet severed with a hatchet, while the piercing screams, the piteous prayers, the hideous contortions of the agonizing victim seem to intoxicate with fiendish delight the fanatic Moslems who inflict such awful cruelties. And why when the last and merciful blow of death is being dealt, must obscene jokes and unutterable blasphemies sear the victim's soul and prolong his hell to the uttermost limits of time, to the very threshold of eternity? Surely, roasting alive, flaying, disembowelling, impaling and all that elaborate and ingenious aggravation of savage pain on which the souls of these human fiends seem to feast and flourish, have nothing that can excuse them in the eyes of Christians, however deeply absorbed in politics or money getting whether in Downing Street or in Wall Street. But the Turk or Kurd is at his best only a Tartar utterly averse to all humanizing influence, and at his worst seems a fiend incarnate perpetrating and glorying in the horrors just enumerated, and in others so gross and vile that they can not be mentioned. But remember that while we may shut our ears to the horrid tale, innocent women and young children are enduring even unto the agonies of death outrages we can not imagine. The Armenians constitute the sole civilizing force--nay with all their faults, the sole humanizing element in Anatolia: peaceful to the last limit of self sacrifice, law-abiding to their own undoing, and at the same time industrious and hopeful under conditions which would stagger the majority of mankind. At their best they are the stuff of which heroes and martyrs are made. Most emphatically they are the martyr nation of the world.