At the close of his speech, Mr. Gladstone stated, in
the most emphatic way, that wherever the Russians and Bulgarians might have committed atrocities at all like the horrors of the Turks, their acts, as being those of Christians, deserved detestation far intenser even than the similar barbarities of the Turks ; but weighing most carefully all the evidence before him, he thought that very little indeed of violence had been com- mitted by the Russian soldiers. "Many outrages and fearful offences have been committed upon Mussulmans, men, women, and children, but the evidence, I think, goes to show that the bulk . of these atrocities have been committed by the Bulgarians." If I Mr. Gladstone refers to the events south of the Balkans at the I time of General Gourko's expedition, we are strongly disposed to believe that the Bulgarians were wholly innocent of the worst atrocities,—of anything except acts of murderous revenge. The letters in the Scotsman, from a correspondent accompanying the van of Gourko's force, showed what horrors that force found: perpetrated by Bashi-Bazouks before the Russians had arrived, and before the Bulgarians were armed. These letters: were a week earlier than those of the correspondents who were told that these horrors were of Bulgarian and Russian, origin, and yet appear to describe just the same facts. In a number of cues, it seems pretty clear that the bodies mangled by Bashi-Bazouks, and seen by the correspondent of the Scotsman, were palmed off on other newspaper correspondents, a week later, as the bodies of the victims of Bulgarian and Russian cruelty. We doubt whether any enormities of the frightful type of those of last autumn have been brought home to either Russians or Bulgarians at all.
Previous page
