Certain German writers have even advocated the application of this policy to the Armenians. According to the Paris _Temps_, Paul Rohrbach, “in a conference held at Berlin some time ago, recommended that Armenia should be evacuated by the Armenians. They should be dispersed in the direction of Mesopotamia, and their places should be taken by Turks in such a fashion that Armenia should be freed of all Russian influence and that Mesopotamia might be provided with farmers which it now lacked.” The purpose of all this was evident enough. Germany was building the Bagdad railroad across the Mesopotamian desert. This was an essential detail in the achievement of the great new German Empire, extending from Hamburg to the Persian Gulf. But this railroad could never succeed unless there should develop a thrifty and industrious population to feed it. The lazy Turk would never become such a colonist. But the Armenian was made of just the kind of stuff which this enterprise needed. It was entirely in accordance with German conceptions of statesmanship to seize these people in the lands where they had lived for ages and transport them violently to this dreary, hot desert. The mere fact that they had always lived in a temperate climate would furnish no impediment in Pan-German eyes. I found that Germany had been sowing these ideas broadcast for several years; I even found that German savants had been lecturing on this subject in the East. “I remember attending a lecture by a well-known German professor,” an Armenian tells me. “His main point was that throughout their history the Turks had made a great mistake in being too merciful toward the non-Turkish population. The only way to ensure the prosperity of the Empire, according to this speaker, was to act without any sentimentality toward all the subject nationalities and races in Turkey who did not fall in with the plans of the Turks’.”