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the work of the Americans was not confined to the new Protestant community. The translation of the Bible led them also into educational work; they laid the foundations of secondary education in Western Asia, and their schools and colleges--still the only institutions of their kind--are attended by Gregorians as well as Protestants, Moslems as well as Christians, Moslem girls as well as boys. As they opened up remoter districts they added medicine to their activities, and their hospitals, like their schools, have been the first in the field. And all this has been built up so unassumingly that its magnitude is hardly realised by the Americans themselves. In the three Turkey Missions, which cover Anatolia and Armenia--the whole of Turkey except the Arab lands--there were, on the eve of the War, 209 American missionaries with 1,299 native helpers, 163 Protestant churches with 15,348 members, 450 schools with 25,922 pupils; Constantinople College and 6 other colleges or high schools for girls; Robert College on the Bosphorus and 9 other colleges for men or boys; and 11 hospitals. The War, when it came, seemed to sweep away everything. The Protestant Armenians, in spite of a nominal exemption, were deported and massacred like their Gregorian fellow-countrymen; the boys and girls were carried away from the American colleges, the nurses and patients from the hospitals; the empty buildings were "requisitioned" by the Ottoman authorities; the missionaries themselves, in their devoted efforts to save a remnant from destruction, suffered as many casualties from typhus and physical exhaustion as any proportionate body of workers on the European battlefields. The Turkish Nationalists congratulated themselves that the American work in Western Asia was destroyed. In praising a lecture by a member of the German _Reichstag_, who had declared himself "opposed to all missionary activities in the Turkish Empire," a Constantinople newspaper[41] wrote: "The suppression of the schools founded and directed by ecclesiastical missions or by individuals belonging to enemy nations is as important a measure as the abolition of the Capitulations. Thanks to their schools, foreigners were able to exercise great moral influence over the young men of the country, and they were virtually in charge of its spiritual and intellectual guidance. By closing them the Government has put an end to a situation as humiliating as it was dangerous." But the missi
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