We are willing to let the Pall Mall Gazette have
the last word on the Rhodope Commission. Our articles on that subject have now been republished by Messrs. Chatto and Windus, and we leave the public to form their own judgment. We decline, there- fore, to restate our proofs that the Congress of Berlin limited the inquiries of the Rhodope Commission in point of time to the period subsequent to the Treaty of San Stefano, and geo- graphically to territory outside the frontiers of the Russian occu- pation. Our contemporary appears to think that "the countries" which are in the vicinity of the Rhodope mountain must neces- sarily be inside the Russian lines. If he doubts the express declaration to the contrary made in the Berlin Congress, let him consult an ordinary map, and be will discover his error. But "the conduct of the Spectator in this matter has given" our contemporary "the deepest pain." We can well believe it, but for a reason very different from that assigned by him. He accuses us of being indifferent to the sufferings of the Mus- sulman refugees in Mount Rhodope, because we have destroyed the edifice of imaginary evidence which he helped to set up. It is he and his clients who have proved themselves indifferent to the sufferings of the Mussulman refugees. In spite of the warnings and remonstrances of the German, Russian, and, as we now learn, of the Austrian Ambassador, they turned a mission of philan- thropy into a pitiful polemic against the character of the Russian Army. And then, when it came to the point, the accusers of Russia had not the courage to formulate in a collective report the accusations which they had wasted their time in collecting. The result is the miserable abortion of an enterprise of which the sole object was the mitigation of human suffering.
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