Happily there are other representatives of culture, other indigenous nationalities, other possibilities of economic development, which will remain in Western Asia when the Turk and German have gone, and which may be equal to repairing the ruin they will leave behind.
For nearly a century now the American Evangelical Missions have been doing work there which is the greatest conceivable contrast to the German Kulturpolitik of the last thirty years. A missionary, sent out to relieve the first pioneers, was given the following instructions by the American Board:
"The object of our missions to the Oriental Churches is, first, to revive the knowledge and spirit of the Gospel among them, and, secondly, by this means to operate upon the Mohammedans.
"The Oriental Churches need assistance from their brethren abroad. Our object is not to subvert them: you are not sent among those Churches to proselytise. Let the Armenian remain an Armenian if he will, the Greek a Greek, the Nestorian a Nestorian, the Oriental an Oriental.
"Your great business is with the fundamental doctrines and duties of the
Gospel[39]."
In this spirit the American missionaries have worked. They have had no warships behind them, no diplomatic support, no political ambitions, no economic concessions. As Evangelicals their first step was to translate the Bible into all the living languages and current scripts of the Nearer East. For the Bulgars and Armenians this was the beginning of their modern literature, but the jealousy of the Orthodox and Gregorian clergy was naturally aroused. Native Protestant Churches formed themselves—not by the missionaries' initiative but on their own. They were trained by the missionaries to self-government, and as they spread from centre to centre they grouped themselves in unions, with annual meetings to settle their common affairs. The missionaries also encouraged them to be self-supporting, and in 1908 the contributions of the Native Churches to the general expenses of the missions were twice as large as those of the American Board[40]. The Ottoman Government recognised its Protestant subjects as a religious corporation (Millet) in 1853, and in spite of this the jealousy of the national Churches was overcome. For 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 missionaries' spirit was something they could not destroy.
"When they deported the Armenians," wrote a missionary, "and left us without work and without friends, we decided to come home and get our vacation and be ready to go wherever we could after the War[42]."