If the Rnssophile party in Bulgaria did not plan the
murder with the encouragement and sanction of the authorities—and it appears to us most likely that the rumours to that effect are ill-founded—the friends of Russia are indecently eager to proclaim its timeliness and to exhibit its usefulness. The St. Petersburg correspondent of the Times reports, in Thurs- day's issue, a conversation between a Russian journalist and the President of the Bulgarian National Assembly, M. Teodoroff, now in the Russian capital with the Deputation which is trying to make peace with the Czar. According to him, there never was any Anti-Russian party even under the rule of M. Stambouloff. The Ministry of M. Stoiloff takes its stand upon friendship with Russia. Last week the Bul- garian Council of Ministers decided to carry out the project of erecting a cathedral in Sofia to the memory of the Czar Emancipator, which bad been put off by M. Stambouloff. Before his murder, M. Stambouloff was already politically dead, and if the authorities had not carefully guarded him he would have been torn to pieces long ago. There could be, M. Teodoroff went on, no question of official complicity in the crime. "It was not the Government who had prevented M. Stambouloff from leaving the country, but the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry, in the interests of justice. He had fallen a victim to the vengeance of those whose friends and relatives he had tortured." The brother of Tufektchieff, M. Teodoroff declared, was tortured in order to extract from him a confession of relations with the Russians, "his body being literally scorched all over with the flame of a lamp." We wonder whether there is any, and if so, what, foundation for those persistent accusations of torture. No doubt the foreign habit of interrogation makes the temptation to tor- ture political conspirators very great. It seems a duty to get information which may save the State.
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