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e instance of the work of Americans at Urmia to show in some detail the character of the work that they were doing, and the Christian and humanising influence of it. But all over Armenia and Anatolia were similar settlements, and, as already mentioned, at the time of the massacres there were established there over a hundred of their churches and over four hundred schools, and from these extracts which concern only one not very large centre, it may be gathered what leaven of civilising influence the sum of their energies must have implied. That lamp shone steady and clear, a 'kindly light' in the darkness of Turkish misrule, and in the havoc of the massacres a beacon of hope, not always reached by those hapless refugees. Indeed it seems to have been only on the frontier that the missions were able to save those foredoomed hordes of fleeing Christians; in Armenia and in Anatolia generally the massacres and 'deportations' were complete, and by the end of 1915 all American missions were closed, for there were none to tend and care for. Even if the massacres had not occurred, the entry of America into the war would have resulted in a similar cessation of their work, and most probably in a massacre of the American missioners themselves. Their withdrawal, of course, was hailed with a peacock scream of pride by that enlightened body under Talaat and Enver, called the New Turkish party of Progress, for their presence was a bar to the Turkish notions of civilisation, in that their influence made for humanity, and health and education. Now 'the humiliating and dangerous situation' (to quote from the columns of _Hilal_) was put an end to, and Turkish progress could make headway again. Similarly in Syria the outbreak of war put an end to 'the humiliating and dangerous situation' of the presence of French schools and missions. There, for many years, French missioners had done the same work as Americans in Armenia, work in every sense liberal and civilising, but undenominational in religious matters and unproselytising. That came to an end earlier than the organisations in Armenia, and in Syria now, as over the rest of the Turkish people, Arabs and Jews and Greeks have nothing except German influence and Kultur to stand between them and the spirit of Turkish progress of which the Armenian massacres were the latest epiphany. Germany, as we have seen, stood by and let the Armenian massacres go on, professing herself unable to interfere
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