The accounts from Macedonia grow worse and worse. In addition
to the constant slaughtering and the frequent atrocities, there is now fear of famine among the fifty or sixty thousand villagers driven from their homes in Monastir, on whose behalf American missionaries are ap- pealing for aid in the United States. According to Reuter's correspondent at Monastir, 110 villages have been destroyed, and out of 9,982 houses in them 9,385 have been burned, often with living beings inside. This is wholly independent of outrages in Roumelia, where the Sultan is rapidly concen- trating the Redifs of his Asiatic dominion, so that be has now more than a quarter of a million soldiers in the field. These are collected, the Sultan declares, only because the Bulgarian Committees commit outrages, then fly into Bulgaria, and then reappear in arms within Roumelia. For himself, he is pressing reforms as diligently as the insurgents will allow. His model Pasha, however, Hilmi Pasha, has refused entrance into Sionastir for six hundred women and children who were lying from the district round Kastoria, and of whose iarratives he was probably afraid. The Austrian Consul, who is a humane man, provided a sort of escort for them oack again.
Previous page
