except the cause to which they had devoted themselves. They recked
nothing of the dangers to which they exposed themselves so long as
there was a child or a woman or a man whom they could feed or nurse.
Terrible as were the sufferings through which the Armenians passed, they
must have been infinitely more unbearable had it not been for these
American missionaries; small as was the remnant that escaped into the
safety of Persia or Russian Trans-Caucasia, their numbers must have been
halved had it not been for the heroism of these men and women. While the
German Consuls contented themselves with a few faint protests to their
Ambassador at Constantinople, followed by an acquiescence of silence,
the missionaries constituted themselves into a Red Cross Society of
intrepid workers, and, as one well-qualified authority tells us,
'suffered as many casualties from typhus and physical exhaustion as any
proportionate body of workers on the European battlefields.' Fully
indeed did they live up to the mandate of the American board that sent
them out: 'Your great business is with the fundamental doctrines and
duties of the Gospel.'

At the opening of the European War the American Missions had been at
work for nearly a hundred years, and were disseminated over Anatolia and
Armenia. They had opened 163 Protestant churches and 450 schools, they
established hospitals, and in every possible way spread civilisation in
a country where the spirit of the governing class was barbarism. It was
not their object to proselytise. 'Let the Armenian remain an Armenian if
he will,' so ran the instructions from which I have already quoted, 'the
Greek a Greek, the Nestorian a Nestorian, the Oriental an Oriental,' and
in the same wise and open-minded spirit they encouraged native
Protestant Churches which were independent of them and largely
self-supporting. Naturally in a country governed by monsters like Abdul
Hamid and Enver Pasha in later days, they earned the enmity which is the
tribute of barbarians to those who stand for civilisation, and when,
owing to the extermination or flight of their Armenian flocks, they were
left without a charge, and their schools were closed, we find a paean of
self-congratulation going up from the Turkish press inspired by the
butchers of Armenia. But till the massacres and the flight were
complete, they gave themselves to the 'duties of the Gospel,' and their
deeds shine like a star into the blackness of that night of m