The preservation of the Armenian element in Asia Minor is indispensable to the well-being and prosperity of the Turks themselves. Politically, as well as economically, it is impossible for the Turks to continue to exist as an independent, and in any measure at all self-supporting, nation without the help of the Armenians. The Armenian massacres illustrate the old story of killing the goose that laid the golden egg. In their pitiful ignorance, in their frenzy of blood-lust, the Turks are turning upon and destroying those whose existence is precious and vital to their community and national life. Travel where you will through Turkey, from one end of the great empire to the other, and you find no community _that is prosperous_ without Armenians. Along the seacoast, the Greeks play an important part in the economic life of Turkey. But in the interior the Armenians are a _sine qua non_ to the Turks. Of the Armenians in Turkey one might have said without fear of contradiction before the terrible events of the past six months, that they were in no place numerically strong enough to jeopardize the political independence of the Ottoman Empire, but that they were everywhere in sufficient number to guarantee its economic independence. Intelligent and patriotic Turks must certainly see that the attempt to exterminate the Armenians, or to banish the remnant of them from Asia Minor, is a mortal blow to Turkish independence, political as well as economic. The extermination of the Armenians is to the interest of a certain nation--but that nation is not Turkey! CHAPTER IV THE GERMAN GOVERNMENT COULD HAVE PREVENTED THIS EFFORT AT EXTERMINATING THE ARMENIAN RACE, BUT HAS CHOSEN NOT TO DO SO. THERE IS GRAVE REASON TO BELIEVE THE GERMAN GOVERNMENT HAS WELCOMED, IF NOT ENCOURAGED, THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE ARMENIANS FROM ASIA MINOR, FOR THE FURTHERANCE OF GERMAN POLITICAL AND COMMERCIAL DESIGNS ON THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE. A patriotic German woman wrote from Marash on June 4, 1915, to the _Sonnenaufgang_, organ of the _Deutscher Hülfsbund für christliches Liebeswerk im Orient_: “Oh, if we could write all that we are seeing!” German missionaries in Asia Minor have been fully as horror-stricken, fully as sympathetic, and fully as indignant as the missionaries of other nations. And I have no doubt that there are millions of Germans to-day, who, _if they were allowed to know the truth_, would protest bitterly to their Government against the extermination of the Armenian nation, and petition their Government, in the name of God, to do something to prevent Germany from being stigmatized in history as partner in the awful crimes that are being committed in the Ottoman Empire.