Two Delegates from Eastern Roumelia are now in London on
a mission to the Great Powers of Europe to petition for the reunion of the two halves of Bulgaria which the Treaty of Berlin cut asunder. Lord Beaconsfield's experiment has now had five years' trial, and the result is pronounced by the people of Eastern Roumelia to be a disastrous failure. In the first place, the arrangement saddles a people just delivered from a ruinous slavery of centuries with the unnecessary cost of a double Government and Administration. In the second place, it imposes on Eastern Roumelia the unjust burden of paying annually to the Porte—that is, to the author of the rain and misery of Bulgaria—three-tenths of its revenues ; a burden rendered still more unjust from the fact that the proportion was fixed on the supposition that the revenues of Eastern Roumelia were £800,000 (Turkish), whereas they amount to no more than 2600,000. But the Eastern Rournelians—such is the natural wealth of the country, and the industry and enterprise of its people—might bear even this injustice without difficulty if the Organic Statute, which restored them to the dominion of the Turks, had not, in the third place, given the Porte a veto on the legislative acts of the unfortunate province. The Porte has used that veto relentlessly against projects which would have developed the wealth of the country. The people know that they must wait, but they desire to warn all men that they wait without consenting to their oppression.
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