[Illustration: ARMENIA, SCENE OF EARLIER TURKISH ATROCITIES] Professor Meillet of the Collège de France, Paris, states that there has been an Armenian literature since the fifth century of our era, and that the old Armenian writings are more original and interesting than the ancient Slavic literatures, which date from several centuries later. Historians of art agree that in architecture, from the fifth to the ninth century, the Armenians were creators of new forms. Professor Meillet adds that at a time when the very name of Franco did not yet exist, and when the French language had not been differentiated the Latin, Armenia was playing a great part in history and had an important literature of its own. At the period of the Crusades the Armenians founded a kingdom in Cilicia and aided the Crusaders. Since the last of the Crusades there have been no independent Armenians. Mussulman, Persian, and Turkish States have dominated their former country. In the nineteenth century the Caucasus portion was taken by Russia. But the Armenian Nation had its own customs, language, literature, and church, and all these it has kept. It had the will to live, and in spite of its subjugation it has lived. SUCCESSFUL EMIGRANTS Armenians, hindered by persecution from tilling their lands, emigrated to other countries, where they developed eminent qualities. Industrious farmers, attached to their native land, they have yet known how, under necessity, to adapt themselves to all the professions of the modern world. Thus they came to fill a large place in Constantinople, in Egypt, in Transylvania, in Poland, and more recently in Baku, in the whole basin of the Mediterranean, and even in America. Everywhere they have made useful citizens; it was an Armenian, Althen, who introduced the cultivation of madder in Southern France. In their own country, where they had preserved a patriarchal system, most of them remained farmers. The Armenian Church, which has not ceased to be autonomous, is the most democratic of the ancient Christian Churches; it is the only one in which laymen take part with the priests in the election of the head of the Church, the Catholicos, who lives in the Convent of Etchmiadzin, in Russian Armenia.