How massacres could well have been avoided is hard to imagine. The Armenians insisted on threatening revolutions; openly boasted that the Powers would help them; silently intrigued against the Government; silently betrayed one another’s intrigues; collected arms and gave offence to the Moslems, and yet possessed no more cohesive fighting or military capacity than rabbits. The falsity of the suggestion of the Pro-Armenians that these were unprovoked massacres inspired by the Turkish Government working upon Moslem fanaticism and Kurdish greed, is also shown by the following passage from Sir Edwin Pears’ book:[7] As a friend to the Armenians, revolt seemed to me purely mischievous. Some of the extremists declared that while they recognized that hundreds of innocent persons suffered from each of these attempts, they could provoke a big massacre which would bring in foreign intervention. The only apparent reason why Sir Edwin Pears regarded as “mischievous” these revolts, resulting in the sacrifice of hundreds of innocent persons, is indicated by his adding that “such intervention was useless so long as Russia was hostile,” and it is interesting also to note the callousness with which the extremists at the cost of hundreds of innocent victims endeavoured to provoke a massacre of thousands of their compatriots. In August 1896 the revolutionaries, having failed to stir up a general rising in Asia determined to adopt desperate measures in Constantinople in the hope of forcing the hands of the Ambassadors. About 1 p.m. on an August afternoon they suddenly attacked with bombs and revolvers the guard of the Ottoman Bank, twelve of whom they killed. They then broke in and seized the European staff as hostages. Besieged in the top story of the bank they threatened to blow up the building with all who were in it, rather than surrender. The Ambassadors hastily appealed to the Porte, who yielded to their importunities on behalf of their nationals and allowed them to guarantee a safe conduct to the conspirators. That night they were quietly smuggled away on Sir Edgar Vincent’s yacht. Bombs were also thrown in the Grand Rue de Pera, near the Galata Serai, and some of the conspirators who had taken a position upon the roofs of the houses in that, the principal thoroughfare of Constantinople, fired upon the populace in the street below. There seems little doubt that the revolutionists had contemplated a series of attacks at different important points, to be followed by a more or less general rising of the Armenian population, which numbered from 200,000 to 400,000.