TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. DISRAELI IN BULGARIA.
THE deliberate suppression of facts by which the Mahom- medan journals of London hope to diminish the effect of the Turkish method of making war, compels us to horrify our readers by republishing the following telegram to the Daily
_News, in extenso:—
" Philippopolis, July 31.
"The investigation into the atrocities is proceeding rapidly. Mr. Baring will probably report that not fewer than sixty villages were burnt and twelve thousand people killed. I do not know what view he will take of the insurrection. Many prisoners have been released since we arrived. Mr. Baring is honestly desirous of obtaining the truth, but is always accompanied by a Turkish escort, which frightens the peasantry. Mr. Garachino, the interpreter, is unfairly prejudiced. He browbeats and bullies the Bulgarians, but is polite and forbearing to the Turks. One whole day he accompanied Tusrem Bey, the leader of the Bashi-Bazouks, when visiting the villages which Tussun Bey burnt. The peasantry afterwards told Mr. Schuyler that they were afraid to come and testify. Mr. Schuyler thinks the reports of the atrocities committed by the Bulgarians utterly unfounded. He believes that about a hundred Turks were killed, nearly all in actual combat. There is no proof yet of a single Turkish woman or child having been killed. Except in three villages, the Bulgarians offered no resistance. In one instance only the Bulgarians attacked the Turks, viz., in a village of mixed inhabitants. Proof has been obtained of atrocities corresponding in the majority of cases with the details in the Daily News. A schoolmistress, a beautiful girl, was arrested for embroidering a flag, and brutally maltreated. She was nicknamed the Queen of the Bulgarians.' She has been released on bail, but was in prison six weeks on bread and water. The poor girl is now ill and broken-hearted."
"Tatar Bazardjik, August 1. "I have just seen the town of Batok, with Mr. Schuyler. Mr. Baring was there yesterday. Here is what I saw. On approaching the town on a hill there were some dogs. They ran away, and we found on this spot a number of skulls scattered about, and one ghastly heap of skele- tons, with clothing. I counted from the saddle a hundred skulls, picked and licked clean ; all of women and children. We entered the town. On every side were skulls and skeletons charred among the ruins, or lying entire where they fell in their clothing. There were skeletons of girls and women, with long brown hair hanging to the skulls. We approached the church. There these remains were more frequent, until the ground was literally covered with skeletons, skulls, and putre- fying bodies in clothing. Between the church and the school there were heaps. The stench was fearful. We entered the churchyard. The sight was more dreadful. The whole churchyard for three feet deep was festering with dead bodies, partly covered ; hands, legs, arms, and heads projected in ghastly confusion. I saw many little hands, heads, and feet of children of three years of age, and girls, with heads covered with beautiful hair. The church was still worse. The floor was covered with rotting bodies quite uncovered. I never imagined anything so fearful. There were three thousand bodies in the church- yard and church. We were obliged to hold tobacco to our noses. In the school, a fine building, two hundred women and children had been burnt alive. All over the town there were the same scenes. In some places, heaps of bodies buried in shallow holes had been uncovered by the dogs. The banks of the little stream were covered with bodies. Many bodies had been carried to Tatar Bazardjik, a distance of thirty miles. The town had 9,000 inhabitants. There now remain 1,200. Many who escaped had returned recently, weeping and moaning over their ruined homes. Their sorrowful wailing could be heard half-a- mile off. Some were digging out the skeletons of loved ones. A woman was sitting moaning over three small skulls with hairs clinging to them, which she had in her lap. The man who did all this, Achmed Aga, has been promoted, and is still governor of the district. The newspaper accounts were not exaggerated. They could not be. No crime invented by Turkish ferocity was left uncommitted. Seven thousand bodies have been lying here since May 12, rotting in the sun, preyed upon by dogs ; and Sir Henry Elliot has never heard that the authorities demand a war contribution from the remaining inhabitants of one hundred thousand piastres. The town formerly paid a million. The harvest is rotting in the fields. The owners are in the church- yard. The survivors' cattle have been taken by the Turks, who refuse to restore it. It is impossible to get in the harvest. It is not true that the Turks are sending help. The inhabitants everywhere complain to Mr. Schuyler that their cattle are not restored, and that help is not given. The statement that the Bulgarians committed atrocities is utterly un- founded and shamefully false. Mr. Schuyler thinks that less than two hundred Turks were killed, nearly all in open combat. There is no proof yet that a single Turkish woman or child was killed or violated. The reports of Mr. Schuyler and Mr. Baring will corroborate this tele- gram. There is urgent need of relief for the starving and helpless families."
This telegram was forwarded to the Daily News by its special correspondent, for whose good-faith many Members of the House of Commons instantly vouched, who is experienced in dangerous Eastern travel, and who has the highest character in the profession for temperance and accuracy. He is travel- ling with Mr. Schuyler, the American Consul-General, as the Turks, with Mr. Disraeli ruling England, might think it safe im execute a mere correspondent who was relating truths incon- venient both to the Divan and the Premier; and Mr. Schuyler evidently assents to the accuracy of the telegram, which will be followed immediately by his own report. Deception under such circumstances is impossible, and exaggeration most improbable, though the Turks, of course, have by this time carefully removed all traces of the bodies, and will probably assure Mr. Baring, if, as is probable, his interpreter did not take him to the churchyard, that no such place ever existed in the town of Batok, if, indeed, there ever was such a locality as Batok at all. There can be no reasonable doubt in the mind of any man, not consciously determined to disbelieve, that the scene described existed ; that in one town, at least, of Bulgaria, the immense majority of Christians were slaughtered, not with the idea of suppressing insurrection, for fair-},,aired little girls are not insurgents, but with the intention of extirpating the people for ever.
The facts, of course, were brought at once before the House of Commons, with many more and the Premier was called upon to give some explanation of his repeated denials that atrocities had over occurred. Will it be believed that Mr. Disraeli, who, on the 10th of July, met similar statements with the bad joke that "Turks usually adopted swifter means of disposing of insurgents," who described these horrors as inevitable in. civil war, and perpetrated by ourselves in Jamaica, and who on July 31 called them imaginary, and specifically denied the burn- ing of the school-house—now authenticated—and pronounced the worst stories "coffee-house babble," never rose in his place, made no apology, expressed no sympathy with the victims, uttered no scourging sentence on the oppressors, but put up an Under- Secretary, Mr. Bourke with instructions to repudiate any possible charge of treating such atrocities with levity. The Premier is constantly in communication on the subject with,—the Divan ? the Admiral of the Fleet in Besika Bay ? the British Ambas- sador at Constantinople I No, with Mr. Bourke ! It is not levity with which Mr. Disraeli is charged in this matter,. though he has been guilty of it, but with leaden-heartedness, with carelessness alike of human suffering and English honour, when neglect of either makes it easier for him to carry out a policy on which he has set his heart, and which, the moment these "snub-nosed Saxons," as he calls us in " Coningsby," have re- turned to their homes, he will pursue as tenaciously, in spite of the revelations now certain, as at first. He will most un- questionably, unless he is prevented, throw the whole moral weight of Great Britain, and if necessary, her sword, into the scale, in order that the remnant of these Bulgarians may remain under the legal dominion of those who have promoted the Governor who sanctioned these atrocities. That is the- whole of his policy,—to "maintain the status quo in Turkey,' the status quo involving a system under which these crimes can be perpetrated with success. For there is the culminating horror of the whole business. These crimes have suc- ceeded. It is because churchyards in Bulgaria are heaped with fair-haired babies' heads, because Bulgaria has been ter- rorised to the ground by means that Alva dared not have employed, and that the Inquisition would have shrunk from as superfluous, that the Servian effort to liberate their kinsmen has failed, and Turkish troops are invading a Christian pro- vince, followed by mobs who would be only too delighted to, reproduce in Vienna or London the scene of Batok Church- yard. Unless Servia and Bulgaria obtain their freedom,. Achmet Aga will have been successful ; and Mr. Disraeli, alone in Europe of civilised statesmen, is resolved that they shall not be free.
Poor Mr. Bourke ! He knows the East, and knows what the telegram meant quite well, realised in a moment that it was true, and we doubt not felt that rush of pity and rage which• was apparent even in the carefully-restrained speech of the usually lymphatic leader of Opposition. He would have liked well, instead of defending his Premier from levity in his treatment of massacres such as have scarcely occurred since the Israelites suppressed Canaanitish in- surgents in the same way, to have announced that the Fleet had quitted Besika Bay to demand the only possible compen- sation,—the autonomy of Bulgaria,,under penalty of the imme- diate shelling of Constantinople, and the consequent destruction of that "negation of God erected into a system,"—they are Mr. Gladstone's words, about a more civilised method of rule—called the Turkish Empire. All he could do, however, was to deny that Mr. Disraeli had joked, and doubt if Mr. Baring's interpreter could have behaved in the way attributed to him, and state that despatches from Mr. Baring, who had just passed through Batok, the day before Mr. Schuyler arrived, confirmed the state- ment that massacres had been perpetrated. Twelve thousand Bulgarians, Mr. Baring thought, had been killed, and sixty towns destroyed, the proportion of children under six being, we presume, a detail not worth mention. The province, however, was ruined, as the Turks would find out when the tithe came to be levied ; but, says Mr. Baring, Salim Effendi told me " that the conditions of the contest, to fight in the way which only regular armies and great States now can manage ; and the regular Turkish Army having the advantage of Prussian guidance, they have been unable to check its advance. They have fought well, the pro-Turkish Correspondents on the spot all recording the heaviness of the Turkish losses ; but the Turks have ex- hibited the stubborn courage and tenacity which for four cen- turies have enabled them to oppress their division of Europe, and have died in thousands uncomplainingly, for the dominance of their faith and their own right to dispose of Infidels as they will. The result has been that Saitschar, and with it the val- ley of the Timok, have been lost, and that General Tchemaieff, promoted to the general command-in-chief, has been com- pelled to fall back upon the valley of the Morava, with troops dispirited by defeat, by that distrust of their Generals which always springs up when patriots are defeated under the com- mand of foreigners, and by doubts whether their Prince is equal to his situation. The Turks will, of course, advance, and if they carry Krajosevatz, Servia, including, perhaps, Belgrade, will be in their power. That would imply a scene such as Europe could hardly bear, and Slavic Europe the Christians were also guilty of many foul deeds,"—as if, sup- posing that true, and it is denounced as pure invention, the Christians were the ruling caste, or had been sent out by a regular and " European " Government to terrorise a province. There is one act, at all events, by which Mr. Disraeli can prove the sincerity of his horror at these crimes. It is too much to ask him to secure justice on their perpetrators, and too useless, for the dead bakes cannot be called in evidence, but at least he can recall Sir Henry Elliot, who either did not know of these scenes, or did not possess sufficient influence with the Divan to put a stop to them. It is quite evident that this officer—who, it will be remembered, was selected by Lord Russell to supersede one of the ablest diplomatists the service ever possessed, Sir James Hudson—is out of place in Constanti- nople. Bulgaria is no distant and inaccessible Asiatic State, where anything can be done in secrecy, but a European province, inhabited by quiet and rather stolid people, who make money by agriculture, and whose sufferings were known to scores of resi- dents in Constantinople. Sir Henry Elliot, it is clear, knew nothing about them, for if he had known, he would, of course, have reported them ; and then, of course, Mr. Disraeli would not have denied that they ever occurred, or have attributed them to the babble of Bulgarian coffee-houses. If he had known and not reported them, he would deserve pgsemptory dismissal from her Majesty's service ; but as he did lot know, he only deserves removal from a post which his ignorance upon a vital point shows that he is unable properly to fill. He may, of course, affirm, and indeed he does affirm, that he sus- pected part of the truth, and therefore remonstrated daily with the Turkish Ministers; but in that case it is proved that, under the most favourable conceivable circumstances, Sir H. Elliot is not a man who has any influence over Turkish officials. The British Government is the only Power which now saves the Turkish Government from the retribution it has deserved. But for it, a Bussian fleet, anchoring off Constantinople, would make a sharp and summary end of the origin of all these crimes, the Turkish Empire in Europe. But for it, Russian corps crarmie would be now driving the Cireassians, out of Bulgaria. British friendship just now is simply invaluable to every Pasha, from lYffdhat to Achmet Aga, yet the representations of the British Ambassador have fallen on such deaf ears that every Servian town entered is burnt to the ground. Clearly the kind of Ambassador whose remonstances are so weak, or are so little heeded by Turks, is not the man who is wanted in Constanti- nople just now. Sir Henry Elliot is said to be out of health, and if so, there is an easy method of replacing him by a man, surely to be found in the Service, who, while strictly obeying instructions, will make a policy possible to the Foreign Office, by intimating unmistakably that if the babies' executioners are not hanged, and the Bashi-Bazouks reduced to discipline, and the Christians completely protected, the Porte will be regarded by Britain as a Power at war with civilisation, an enemy of the human race, whom any Power has a right to attack and to destroy. There would, of course, be no necessity for any menaces so grave. The most sickening part of the whole affair, except Mr. Disraeli's jocularity, is, that we have an official in Constantinople ten words from whom would have protected the Bulgarians, but who was too ill-informed, or too prejudiced, or too weak to pronounce them.
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