In the nineteenth century, though possessing no intellectual centre of their own, the Armenians found means for giving a modern literature to Russian Armenia and another to Turkish Armenia. Occupying a part of Asia that is a natural passageway between the Orient and the Occident, says Professor Meillet, they have been, since the fifth century, carriers of European civilization. Their vanguard position has made of them the martyrs of Western culture. Their success and their European character made them odious to their Turkish masters, who were less industrious than they. By the Treaty of Berlin in 1878 Turkey pledged herself to introduce reforms and ameliorations in Armenia, and to protect these people from attacks by the Kurds and Circassians; but the pledge was never kept. After the massacres at Sassun in 1894 Europe made a more imperious demand for reforms; Sultan Abdul Hamid promised them--and immediately ordered the great massacres of 1895 and 1896, which won for him the name of the Red Sultan. UNDER THE YOUNG TURKS The Young Turk revolution promised to improve the lot of the Armenians by instituting liberty in the Ottoman Empire; in reality the Young Turks desired only to make a unified empire of which they should be masters; they tried to "Turkify" all the races under them by persecuting those who wished to keep their own character; in 1909 they caused the Armenians at Adana to be massacred. When the Young Turk Government allied itself with the Central Empires, learning organization from the Germans, it organized the destruction of the Armenians in 1915 on scientific lines. It ordered the deportation of these people from land which they had occupied for more than 2,000 years, and, after massacring the men and seizing the young women, it caused the rest of the women and the children to perish of hunger, thirst, and fatigue along the highways into which they had been driven; it sent them to die in the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were thus destroyed. When the victorious Russian troops entered Erzerum and Trebizond they found only a few dozens of Armenians out of the tens of thousands who had inhabited those cities. The German authorities knew of these massacres; they made no protest. In Syria the Christian population was destroyed by other methods; all the food was taken away, and then the district was isolated and the entrance of new food supplies forbidden. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians died of hunger. Germany knew of this crime; it did not protest. EXTERMINATING A RACE The great war gave the Young Turk leaders their long-desired opportunity to crush the Armenians. Henry Morgenthau, the United States Ambassador at Constantinople at that time, says in a recent statement: