Writing to the friends who had sent him aid Mr. Macallum said: "You may rest assured that there are hundreds of poor starving people who bless you and the givers night and day. We have sought to help only those who are most needy, and the testimony of all is that the help we have administered has saved many from a terrible death. 'You have redeemed us.' 'You have bought our children's blood.' 'May the Lord reward you a thousandfold for all you have done!' These and other like expressions we hear every day. Some of those who get bread from us regard it as sacred, and eat it as they take the sacrament in church. We are giving bread regularly to over a thousand people a day in the city, Protestants, Greeks, Catholics, and Gregorians. We have given £50 to the governor here for the Turkish poor. This gift was comparatively small, but more gratitude was expressed by the Turkish authorities than by the Gregorians, to whom we had given the most." The summer of 1894 instead of bringing relief, brought increased burdens from the frequent raids of the wild Kurds, who during that single year drove out of the districts of Boolanyk and Moush alone more than ten thousand head of cattle and sheep. The result was the utter disappearance of wealth and the rapid spread of misery so intense, so hopeless, so distressing in its moral and physical effects as to have inspired some of its victims with that wild courage which is akin to despair. To the depredations of the Kurds, were added the cruel extortions of the Zaptiehs, or official tax-gatherers. There was absolutely no redress for Christians who suffered in property, life or limb at the hands of Mohammedans. The taxes levied upon Armenians were exorbitant; the bribes that invariably accompanied them, and were imposed by the Zaptiehs, swelled to any proportions, and assumed the most repugnant forms, while the methods employed to collect both constituted by themselves sufficient justification for the sweeping away of Ottoman rule in Armenia. To give a fair instance of the different rates of taxation for Christians and Mohammedans in towns it will suffice to point out that in Erzeroum, where there are eight thousand Mohammedan houses, the Moslems paid only three hundred and ninety-five thousand piastres, whereas the Christians, whose houses number but two thousand, paid four hundred and thirty thousand piastres. The barbarities and the enormities and savagery of the Sassoun massacres left those districts in a most deplorable condition. After decimating the population, the Kurds burned and utterly destroyed many villages and drove off all their cattle and sheep and left the plains as if swept by cyclone and wrecked by earthquake.