Mr. MacColl has made a point against Sir Henry Elliot
and Consul Holmes, in relation to the discredit which they threw on Dr. Liddon's and his own testimony respecting the impalement on the frontiers of Bosnia. From the nem- Blue-book it appears that Sir Henry Elliot had re- ceived in April last a report by Mr. Freeman alleging that Rado Benjich had been impaled on the 10th March, and exposed for four hours near Novi ; that all the Vienna papers had printed and accepted this story, and that Sir Henry Elliot had received Mr. Freeman's account without expressing any of that incredulity which he expressed as to Canon Liddon's and Mr. MacColl's story, and Bishop Strossmayer's con- firmations of it. Of course the agents of the Porte deny absolutely all the facts alleged, after what they describe as a minute inquiry. They always do. But as Mr. Mac Coll well points out in the Times of Wednesday, the general belief expressed by the Vienna papers on these tortures only a year ago, and the mode in which these allegations were received by the British Ambassador at Constan- tinople, sufficiently show that the extravagant terms in which Consul Holmes's incredulity was expressed, when he said that for the last twenty years, not even in the wilds of Mesopotania, much less in Europe, had he ever heard of a single instance of this .old barbarous custom, were exceedingly wide of the mark, and that many other persons besides Dr. Liddon and Mr. MacColl and Bishop Strossmayer had, in their own belief, exceedingly good evidence for the survival of this hideous Turkish torture. Note that Consul Freeman's despatch describing the alleged tortures has never appeared, though the Turkish contradiction is published in extenso. Mr. Bourke says it was not right to publish it till the Turkish answer had appeared ? Why, then, was it right to pub- lish the Turkish answer till the statement to which it was an answer had appeared ?
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