29 JULY 1876, Page 3

• Dr. Humphry Sandwith, who is an authority on Eastern

affairs, writing to the Times of this day week, comments very much to the point on Mr. Disraeli's wonderful assertion in the House of Commons that the Circassians transplanted by the I Porte to Bulgaria, on purpose to be a thorn in the side of the I Bulgarians, have "lived peacefully there for twenty years." I "Their conduct," said Mr. Disraeli, on the 10th July, "has been satisfactory, and there has been no imputation on them of savage or turbulent behaviour. They have cultivated farms and built villages, and during the whole period, I think, there has been no complaint of these men." To which Dr. Sandwith replies, that the Circassians were granted lands in Bulgaria, where there was a large population, rather than in Asia Minor, where there was a very thin one, on purpose to terrorise the Bulgarians; that they built no villages, but made the Christians build vil- lages for them ; and that they have been notorious plunderers, which is what they were meant to be, ever since. The Circas- sians sell their own daughters to the Turks for wives, and no doubt, therefore, it is true that they only treat the Bulgarian girls as they treat their own daughters when they sell them too. But the habits of violence and of indifference which are natural to them, become instruments of torture in their hands when they treat the children of their enemies in the same manner. A race whose very schoolboys boast of having killed their five or six Bulgarians, are not quite the gentle and tame creatures Mr. Dis- raeli images to the House of Commons. Mr. Disraeli's mild Cireassians are rather like the famous " Kirke's lambs,"—wolves in lambs' clothing.