“Decidedly. The new government seems to be working very hard to organize an educational system throughout the empire and is copying European methods. It is sending boys to foreign countries to be educated for teachers, and is also placing students in almost every one of the American colleges and high schools. Five government students have matriculated at Robert College and five young women entered the American College for Girls last winter to be educated at the government’s expense as instructors in the national schools. When the American College for Girls moves to its new location next year, the imperial government will start a school in their old building, with the American college as its model. Normal schools and high schools are being opened as fast as competent instructors can be found, but the great obstacle to the extension of the school system is the lack of teachers and the inability to pay such salaries as will tempt educated men to undertake the work.
“The most significant and satisfactory feature of the new régime is the recognition of Christian schools on the same basis as Moslem schools by the Department of Education. In the allotment of the funds appropriated for education the American missionary schools are receiving the same assistance as those recently organized by the government.”
In the work of the American missionaries in Turkey, as in other parts of the world, printing presses are of importance. Without them little could have been accomplished; slow progress would have been made. There are two great publication houses in the near East, one under the direction of the Presbyterian board at Beirut, and the other under the Congregational church in Constantinople. They are the most complete and modern printing plants in that part of the world, representing an investment of many thousands of dollars and equal to any of their size in the United States. The presses are going all the time, turning out an average of fifty million pages each a year in not less than ten languages. The output, since the presses were established in 1833, has undoubtedly been as large as that of any other printing house in the world, and indeed there are few of longer or greater age or better record.
The entire plan of missionary work in Turkey at the beginning was based upon the use of these presses, and within three years after the first missionaries arrived in that field, a plant was set up on the island of Malta to furnish literature for Palestine and Turkey. It was considered unsafe to attempt at that time to do any printing on Turkish soil, and Malta, being under the British flag, was the nearest locality where the presses could run without interruption. In 1833, the political atmosphere having cleared, the Arabic outfit was transferred to Beirut in Syria, while the Greek, Turkish, and Armenian branches were set up in Smyrna. During the ten years at Malta, more than twenty-one million pages were printed for the benefit of Greeks, Armenians and Turks. This included text-books for the elementary schools, which were chiefly translations of standard American editions. Then came the Bible, which has since been translated and published entire in four different languages, and partially in several more, and distributed by millions of copies throughout the East.
The Bible was translated into Turkish and published at Smyrna in 1836. Dr. Elias Riggs’s translation into Armenian was published in 1852, and his translation into Bulgarian in 1871. The Arabic Bible, translated by Smith and Van Dyck, has since been issued from the Beirut press, and more than 1,500,000 copies have been circulated.
In a single year the American press at Beirut issued 152,500 volumes of distinctively Biblical literature, with a total of 47,278,000 pages, in addition to nearly 9,000,000 pages of text-books and other literature, making a total of 56,000,000 pages from that one plant.
This other literature consists of hymn books, school books of all kinds and of all grades, from kindergarten material to theological and medical works; picture books for children, Christmas cards, Sunday-school lessons, story books, translations of standard works, and several original works by both native and American authors.
The work of Bible publication has since continued under the patronage of the American Bible Society and the British and Foreign Bible Societies, until the entire Scriptures are now available for all Turkish, Arabic, Syrian, Persian, Armenian, Bulgarian, and Greek speaking peoples, and the New Testament, the Psalms and other parts are available for Kurds and Albanians. It is bound in cheap form and convenient size and sold at cost. Very few copies are given away.
Although the Armenian claims to be the oldest branch of the Christian church, yet when the American missionaries came, they had only a few manuscript copies of the Bible, kept in monasteries or in the larger churches, carefully guarded by priests who were themselves unable to read the text, while the people were permitted only to kiss the covers which were often of solid silver. To-day, thanks to Dr. Elias Riggs, one of the veteran American missionaries, every Armenian can have his copy of the Scriptures in his own language at a nominal price. It is a significant fact that the editions are disposed of as rapidly as they are turned off the press, and it is asserted by competent authority that this book has done more to unify and simplify the modern Armenian language than all other influences combined.
The same is true of the Bulgarian language. There was no Bulgarian literature until American missionaries began to write it, and the missionary presses began to publish it. Of the first one hundred books in the Bulgarian language seventy were issued by the missionary press at Smyrna and Constantinople.