Thus the Turks led an existence full of pleasure, pride and luxury, and they degenerated; while agriculture, commerce and industry which they despised made the Armenians comparatively prosperous, and the Christian faith which the Turks hated, rendered the Armenian family great and healthy, and the Armenian community stronger, having greater solidarity. In brief, Armenia appeared to the Turk like a little Europe rising in the very bosom of the Ottoman Empire. Already in 1876 the Turkish newspapers of Constantinople were publishing editorials with regard to the alarming increase of the Armenians and the decrease of the Turks. The Sultan, Abdul-Hamid, who aimed, and still is aiming, to be a very great Padishah, devoted himself to the task of readjusting the balance in favor of the Turks. His Khalific intelligence had nothing to do with causes. He never troubled himself with the complicated question why the Turks were not increasing, why a rich Moslem with three wives had no children, while a simple Christian artisan with one wife had three or four or half a dozen. To Hamid's mind the problem was very simple. Are the Armenians getting rich? he will plunder them. Have they organized educational, religious or other benevolent associations? he will scatter them. Have they bishops, professors and other leaders of high education; and are they increasing in numbers? he will by exile and wholesale massacres get rid of them. If anywhere any of them should venture to resist plunderers or defend the honor of their wives and daughters or kill any of his imperial brigands in self-defense, he will regard and declare them to Europe as rebels and treat them and the rest of their nation as such. His satanic accounts were quite well made up. Some Armenians did, from sheer exasperation and desperation, resist their foul aggressors. Hamid was glad. He ordered the annihilation of Sassoun in 1894. Successful in that, he, in 1895, by the kind permission of Christian Europe and America, proceeded to destroy the Armenian nation and extirpate the Armenian Church by wholesale massacres and forced conversions to Islam. The sword, even in the hands of the Turks, had never been used with such ferocity. The Turks surpassed themselves in these late massacres. They displayed to the world the bottom of their infernal foulness. Unable to use their sword against Europe, which has grown far too powerful for them, they used it to cut down the Armenian Europe in its bud. And the consciousness of their impotence against the Great Powers intensified their cruelty and hatred with regard to the defenseless and unarmed Armenians.