lingered there remained these dauntless and self-sacrificing men and women, regardless of everything 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 murder.

I will take as an example of the superb heroism of those men and women the diary of an American lady attached to the mission at Urmia, a document that, anonymously, is one of the noblest, least self-conscious records I have ever read.  The period of it extends over five months.