I have talked personally with, or have seen letters and reports from, American missionaries and consular officials of all nations, who were witnesses of the massacres of 1895 and 1896. At that time, as a result of unendurable persecution and injustice, certain organizations of young men, of the type the French call _exaltés_, banded together in secret societies, an imitation of internal organizations in Russia, agitated, within the Ottoman Empire and abroad, for a more favourable treatment of Armenians and other Christians. Some of these _exaltés_ certainly advocated, and tried to work for, the independence of Armenia. But the propaganda never gained favour in ecclesiastical circles, nor ground among the great mass of the Armenian population in Turkey. Except in the _vilayet_ of Van, the Armenians no longer formed the majority of the population. They were too scattered throughout the empire to have serious hope of winning independence, such as the Greeks, Bulgarians, Servians, and Rumanians had succeeded in obtaining in the Balkan peninsula.[1] In the 1909 massacre, I was on the ground at the time, and studied these charges. I demonstrated to my own satisfaction (and to that of a number of newspaper men, including Germans) the total lack of foundation of this charge against the Armenians of Cilicia. Not one Armenian out of a hundred had anything to do with the revolutionary societies. The lower classes were too ignorant to be affected by such a propaganda. The Armenian Church denounced the folly of the visionaries. College professors spoke and wrote against it. The wealthy city classes frankly let the agitators know that they were not only passively, but also actively, opposed to the propaganda. The Turks had nothing whatever to fear from Armenian revolutionaries. They knew this. More than that, they knew just who the _exaltés_ were. The Turkish Government was well able to assure itself that the propagandists were not to be feared. If they had feared them, they could easily have laid their hands on them any time they wanted to. In Adana, the arrest of from thirty to forty young men would have gathered into the net all the agitators. Instead of that, six thousand were massacred there, and half the city burned. Then the Armenian revolution was trumped up as an excuse!