At the same time every precaution was taken to prevent the news of these wholesale acts of rapine and massacre from being known to the outside world. No strangers or visitors were allowed to enter the country where these scenes were taking place, and the most rigorous censorship was applied to all letters coming from them. Save in a few rare cases where the mollahs refused to obey, in the belief that the Koran did not justify such acts, the instructions were acted on and the policy of murder and robbery was preached in the mosques. In the province of Bitlis twenty-four Armenian villages were destroyed by Zeki Pasha. Their inhabitants were butchered. Zeki was decorated by the Sultan for this infamy. In 1895, and again in 1896, wholesale massacres of Armenians took place, organized by Sultan Abdul Hamid, and effected through the agency of Shakir Pasha and other officials, civil and military. It was estimated that a hundred thousand Armenians were victims of these massacres, either directly or indirectly by starvation and disease which followed them. Constantinople itself, on August 22 and 28, 1896, was the scene of an organized attack on the Armenian quarter. It was invaded by gangs of men armed with clubs, who bludgeoned every Armenian to be found there. In vain did the ambassadors protest and appeal to the treaty of Berlin. In vain did Mr. Gladstone issue, for the last time, from his retirement and appeal to public opinion on behalf of these people, designating the Sultan as Abdul the Great Assassin. No Power was willing to use force or even to threaten force on behalf of the Armenians. Even Russia was disinclined to do so. These people had no wish to be absorbed by Russia. An Armenian of good position and wide acquaintance with his countrymen in Asia Minor, when questioned by the writer on this point in 1890, said that the Armenians had no desire to become subjects of Russia. They would prefer to remain under the Turks, if England would hold a big stick over the Sultan; but if England would not do this, they would prefer Russia, or the devil himself, to the Turk. It need not be said that those massacres of 1890-5 have been completely put into the shade by the far more extensive and bloody massacres of 1915, and that the policy of deporting the whole population of Armenians has been carried to a terrible conclusion.