Mr. Gladstone made a most eloquent speech on Turkey on
Saturday, at the Taunton Railway Station, where he had been waylaid by a deputation of Taunton electors. He declared that we owed obligations to the Turkish Christians, both on the ground of humanity and of our previous conduct. As to humanity, nothing in the history of modern slavery could compare with the treatment of the Christians by their masters, and as to our conduct—" it is we who have maintained Turkey in possession of the power she has so lamentably mis- used." We are morally in the position of shipowners in the slave-trade. He held that Turkey had trampled under foot the Treaties of 1856, and that its Constitution, even if worked as a reality, would only tend to legalise and accentuate the tyranny of Mahommedans over Christians. There will be in the Assembly a "limited, a discouraged, and in some cases, a debased Christian minority, in the face of a Mahommedan majority," to which latter we are invited to leave the task of doing justice to the Christians. Mr. Gladstone added that he knew, upon evidence for which he was prepared to be responsible, that in September last, while all England was protesting in horror at the atrocities in Bulgaria, precisely simi- lar horrors were being perpetrated, though upon a smaller scale, in Bosnia, and there was no guarantee whatever against their re- petition. It was a matter of personal duty to every Englishman to see justice done to the Christians in Turkey.
