How many countless times did I have to look on at that typical spectacle of little bands of Armenians belonging to the capital being escorted through the streets of Pera by two gendarmes in their ragged murky grey uniforms with their typical brutal Anatolian faces, while a policeman who could read and write marched behind with a notebook in his hand, beckoning people at random out of the crowd with an imperious gesture, and if their papers showed them to be Armenians, simply herding them in with the rest and marching them off to the "Karakol" of Galata-Seraï, the chief police-station in Pera, where he delivered up his daily bag of Armenians! The way these imprisonments and deportations were carried on is a most striking confutation of the claims of the Turkish Government that they were acting only in righteous indignation over the discovery of a great conspiracy. This is entirely untrue. With the most cold-blooded calculation and method, the number of Armenians to be deported were divided out over a period of many months, indeed one may say over nearly a year and a half. The deportations only began to abate when the downfall of the Armenian Patriarchate in summer 1916 dealt the final blow to the social life of the Armenians. They more or less ceased in December 1916 with the gathering-in of all those who had formerly paid the military exemption tax--among them many eminent Armenian business men. What can be said of the "righteous, spontaneous indignation" of the Armenian Government when, for example, of two Armenian porters belonging to the same house--brothers--one is deported to-day and the other not till a fortnight later; or when the number of Armenians to be delivered up daily from a certain quarter of the town is fixed at a definite figure, say two hundred or a thousand, as I have been told was the case by reliable Turks who were in full touch with the police organisation and knew the system of these deportations? Of the ebb and flow of these persecutions, all that can be said is that the daily number of deportations increased when the Turks were annoyed over some Russian victory, and that the banishments miraculously abated when the military catastrophes of Erzerum, Trebizond, and Erzindjan gave the Government food for thought and led them to wonder if perhaps Nemesis was going to overtake them after all. And then the method of transport! Every day towards evening, when these unfortunate creatures had been collected in the police-stations, the women and children were packed into electric-trams while the men and boys were compelled to go off on foot to Galata with a couple of blankets and only the barest necessities for their terrible journey packed in a small bag. Of course they were not all poor people by any means.