What is wanted to complete the symmetry of this picture of the intellectual progress of Oriental women is that a deputation of Mohammedan ladies should attend the great World’s Congress of Women from all the nations, and explain to their sisters from Christian and pagan Empires wherein consists the excellency and glory of the veiling and seclusion of Mohammedan women in harems and zenanas, and the permission to their men to have four legal wives and as many concubines as their right hands may acquire by purchase or capture. They should have the opportunity to explain the superiority of this system to that of Christianity, under which woman is allowed the most complete liberty of action, is trusted and honored, and given the highest place in the great organized enterprises of benevolence, charity, religion and social reform, and in the relief of human suffering at home and abroad.
III. To Protestant Missions is due the modern intellectual and educational awakening of the whole Empire. The American schools had been in operation forty years before the Turkish government officially promulgated (in 1869), school laws, and instituted a scheme of governmental education.
In 1864 there were twelve thousand five hundred elementary Mosque schools for reading the Koran, in which there were said to be half a million of students. In 1890, according to the recently published Ottoman reports, there were in the Empire forty-one thousand six hundred and fifty-nine schools of all kinds, of which three thousand are probably Christian and Jewish. As there are thirty-five thousand five hundred and ninety-eight mosques in the Empire, and each mosque is supposed to have its “medriseh” or school, there would appear to be about four thousand secular government schools not connected with the mosques, independent of ecclesiastical control by mollahs and sheikhs, and belonging to the imperial graded system of public instruction; yet many of the mosque schools have now been absorbed into the government system, so that there may be twenty thousand of these so-called secular government schools....
Armenian Peasants Fleeing to Russia.
There are now in the Empire eighty hundred and ninety-two Protestant schools, with forty-three thousand and twenty-seven pupils.
| Schools. | Boys. | Girls. | Total Pupils. | |
| In Syria and Palestine | 328 | 9,756 | 9,081 | 18,837 |
| In Egypt | 100 | 3,271 | 3,029 | 6,300 |
| In Asia Minor, etc. | 464 | 10,000 | 7,890 | 17,890 |
| Total | 892 | 23,027 | 20,000 | 43,027 |
Of these pupils twenty thousand are girls, a fact most potent and eloquent with regard to the future of these interesting peoples.
There are thirty-one colleges, seminaries and boarding-schools for girls, of which eleven are taught by English and twenty by American ladies. In some of these schools young women are carried to the higher branches of science. In all of them the Bible is taught as a daily text book.
There are six American colleges for young men, the most of them well equipped and manned, taking the lead in academic and scientific training. The medical college in Beirut has pupils from nearly all parts of the Empire.