This description of the condition of Asia Minor as the result of the capture of Constantinople continued down to the ultimate complete destruction of the Christians by the Turks. Nothing changed in the nearly five centuries that have passed. The Turk has not altered either in his character or his methods. The scenes described by Pears as following the taking of the Queen City, the massacres and violation of women, were duplicated at Smyrna, with the added horror of the sufferings of the Christians on the quay. After Constantinople, Smyrna, “Ghiaour Smyrna,” became the last stronghold of Christianity and Greek culture in the Near East. It had its great and valuable libraries, its learned men, its famous schools. The Greeks and Armenians could at any time have attained safety by abjuring their faith. Yet, though there have been apostates, they have, in general, kept the faith and have suffered. The only civilization that has existed in Turkey since that black year, 1453, has been that supplied to it by the Christian remnant of the old Byzantine Empire. For that reason the work of the American and other missionaries took on a great importance. They went out originally to Turkey to convert Moslems. They found that they could not do this, but that their real mission was with the Christians, who were eager to be uplifted and enlightened. The recent rapid development of the latter in advanced agriculture, industries, commerce, education, was restoring Christianity in the Orient and reknitting the wasted and torn fabric of the old Byzantine Empire. To the great Christian Powers was given a tardy and last opportunity of repairing the wrong that was done the world when St. Sophia, the Temple of the Eternal Wisdom, fell into the hand of the Turk. CHAPTER XXI NUMBER DONE TO DEATH How many were massacred in Smyrna and its dependent towns and villages? It is impossible to make any estimate at all accurate, but the efforts to minimize the number must at first glance fail of credence. Official statistics give the Armenian inhabitants of Smyrna as twenty-five thousand and it is certain that the larger part of the men of this community were killed, besides many women and girls, also numerous Greeks. A despatch to the _London Daily Chronicle_ of September 18, 1922, says: “The lowest estimate of lives lost given by the refugees places the total at one hundred and twenty thousand.” Reuter’s Agency, in a despatch of the same date, makes the following statement: “From none of the accounts is it possible to give the exact figures of the victims, but it is feared that in any case they will be over one hundred thousand.” Mr. Roy Treloar, newspaper correspondent, wired as follows:[9] “Nureddin Pasha commenced a systematic hunting down of Armenians, who were gathered in batches of one hundred, taken to the _Konak_ and murdered.”