Sometimes even this was not speedy enough for the Government, and a case occurred in Autumn 1916--absolutely verified by statements made by German employees on the Baghdad Railway--where some thousands of Armenians, brought as workers to this stretch of railway, simply vanished one day without leaving a trace. Apparently they were simply shipped off into the desert without more ado and there massacred. This terrible catalogue of crime on the part of the Government of Talaat is, however, in spite of all censorship and obstruction, being dealt with _officially_ in all quarters of the globe--by the American Embassy at Constantinople and in neutral and Entente countries--and at the conclusion of peace it will be brought as an accusation against the criminal brotherhood of Young Turks by a merciless court of all the civilised nations of the world. I have spoken to Armenians who have said to me, "In former times the old Sultan Abdul-Hamid used to have us massacred by thousands. We were delivered over by well-organised pogroms to the Kurds at stated times, and certainly we suffered cruelly enough. Then the Young Turks, as Adana 1909 shows, started on a bloodshed of thousands. But after what we have just gone through we long with all our hearts for the days of the old massacres. Now it is no longer a case of a certain number of massacred; now _our whole people_ is being slowly but surely exterminated by the national hatred of an apparently civilised, apparently modern, and therefore infinitely more dangerous Government. "Now they get hold of our women and children and send them long journeys on foot to concentration camps in barren districts where they die. The pitiful remains of our population in the villages and towns of the Interior, where the local authorities have carried out the commands of the central Government most zealously, are forcibly converted to Islam, and our young girls are confined in Turkish harems and places of low repute. "The race is to vanish to the very last man, and why? Because the Turks have recognised their intellectual bankruptcy, their economic incompetence, and their social inferiority to the progressive Armenian element, to which Abdul-Hamid, in spite of occasional massacres, knew well enough how to adapt himself, and which he even utilised in all its power in high offices of state. Because now that they themselves are being decimated by a weary and unsuccessful war of terrible bloodshed that was lost before it was begun, they hope in this way to retain the sympathy of their peoples and preserve the superiority of their element in the State.