LESSONS IN MASSACRE : 
 
 AN EXPOSITION OP 
 
 THE CONDUCT OF THE PORTE IN AND 
 ABOUT BULGARIA 
 
 SINCE MAY, 1878. 
 
 CHIEFLY FUOM THE PAPERS PRESENTED BY COMMAND. 
 
 BT THE 
 
 HIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE, M.P. 
 
 :ornia 
 lal 
 
 y 
 
 LONDON: 
 JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 
 
 1877. 
 
 Pi ice ITtro Shillings* 
 
 WILLIAM CLOWES AXD SONS,] [STAMFORD STREET AMD CHAKIWO CBOSS.
 
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 LESSONS IN MASSACRE; 
 
 OR, 
 
 SINCE MAY, 1876. 
 
 CHIEFLY FROM THE PAPERS PRESENTED BY COMMAND. 
 
 BY THE 
 
 RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE, M.P. 
 
 "Away, with me, all you whose souls abhor 
 The uncleanly savours of a slaughterhouse ; 
 For I am stifled with this smell of sin." 
 
 KING JOHN, iv. 3. 
 
 LONDON: 
 JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 
 
 1877.
 
 LONDON C 
 PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND 
 
 BTAHFORD STREBT AND CHAKINO CROSS.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE INTRODUCTION 5 
 
 THE PEOOF: 
 
 I. INQUIRY , 16 
 
 II. MORE INQUIRY 21 
 
 III. THE PROVOCATION , 23 
 
 IV. PROCEEDINGS AGAINST BULGARIANS .. .. 25 
 V. TURKS REWARDED 30 
 
 VI. TURKS NOT REWARDED 35 
 
 VII. CONDUCT OF THE COMMISSIONERS .. .. 39 
 
 VIII. THE RESTORATIONS BY ORDER 42 
 
 IX. THEIR NATURE 43 
 
 X. TAXATION CONTINUED 46 
 
 XL OUTRAGES CONTINUED 46 
 
 XII. TROOPS WITHHELD 55 
 
 XIII. NO REGRET OR CONDEMNATION 60 
 
 XIV. OUTRAGES DENIED 61 
 
 XV. PROCEEDINGS AGAINST TURKS 64 
 
 XVI. PRAISE CLAIMED FOR THE MASSACRES .. 64 
 
 XVII. FINAL EXPLOSION OF THE INQUIRY .. .. 66 
 
 THE CONCLUSION . 70 
 
 B 2
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 i. 
 
 THE INTRODUCTION. 
 
 THE lesson, which the Turkish Government has con- 
 veyed to its Mahometan subjects by its conduct since 
 last May in the matter of the Bulgarian rising, can- 
 not be more pithily or more accurately expressed 
 than in the three short English words, " Do it 
 again." My charge is, that this lesson was conveyed ; 
 and not only conveyed, but intended to be con- 
 veyed ; that it is as plain, as if it had been set forth 
 expressly in a Firman of the Sultan, or a Fetwa 
 of the Sheik ool Islam. To comprehend aright this 
 great lesson in Massacre, we must look at the facts 
 as a whole, and must carefully scrutinise the details 
 in themselves, as well as in their bearing one upon 
 another. It may seem that one, who is no more 
 than a private individual, is guilty of presumption 
 in dealing with so great and perilous a question. 
 But I have a great faith in the power of opinion, of 
 the opinion of civilised and Christian Europe. It
 
 6 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 can remove mountains. I have seen this in the 
 recent past; and I seem to see it in no distant 
 future. 
 
 Six months ago, England and Europe had just 
 learned, upon official authority, the reality and ex- 
 tent of the Massacres, and of the outrages far worse 
 than Massacre, in Bulgaria. Over and above the 
 horrors of the perpetration, there was ground for 
 the darkest surmises as to the seat of the ultimate 
 responsibility for those fiendish crimes. Miscreants, 
 fatally prominent in the proceedings, had been 
 decorated and rewarded ; and; the solemn business of 
 retributive inquiry had been visibly tampered with 
 by the Turkish Government, to which we had been 
 lending, through a blood-stained period, our moral 
 and our material support. But the revelation of the 
 facts was still new; and there had not been time 
 sufficient for clearly carrying home the guilt beyond 
 the wretched men, who performed the deeds of 
 blood and shame. The belief that a Government in 
 alliance with Her Majesty could stand in close com- 
 plicity with crimes, so foul that the very possibility 
 of them seems to lower the level of our nature, was 
 a belief so startling, nay, so horrible, that it was not 
 fit to be entertained, unless upon the clearest and 
 fullest evidence. And all this time we were un- 
 blushingly assured, by one if not more of the organs 
 of the Turkish cause in the London Press, that order, 
 momentarily disturbed in Bulgaria by agents from
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 7 
 
 abroad, had been restored, and that life, honour, and 
 property were secure under a calumniated but really 
 paternal G-overnment. 
 
 As time has gone on, and facts have gradually 
 emerged, those surmises, which at first floated as thin 
 vapours in the air, have acquired more and more of 
 substance and consistency : and at length the copious, 
 but not too copious, Papers supplied to Parliament 
 have so accumulated the evidence, as to leave no 
 longer any room for reasonable doubt. We have 
 now to confront a fact, more revolting than the fact 
 of the Massacres themselves. The supposition, which 
 I have described as too shocking to be entertained in 
 our state of imperfect knowledge, now stands forth as 
 clear as the lurid light of a furnace against the 
 blackness of a nocturnal sky. Let me try to make 
 entirely plain the issue, which in these pages I desire 
 to raise. 
 
 There were separate acts which, in September, 
 it was perhaps possible to construe, by a large indul- 
 gence, as referable to weakness, to accident, or to 
 the bewilderment and confusion attendant upon war, 
 in a country which never had any but a military 
 organisation, and which has now lost in the main even 
 that solitary ornament. Such a construction would 
 now be irrational. All the acts, and all the non-acts, 
 of the Turkish Government, before the rising when we 
 knew them scantily, during and since the lamentable 
 scenes, when we know them but too fully, stand forth
 
 8 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 to view in a dark and fatal consistency. It matters 
 not who was Sultan or who was Vizir. Eushdi was as 
 Mahmoud, and Midhat was as Rushdi, and Edhem 
 thus far is as Midhat. There, is a point of develop- 
 ment and ripeness in a series of acts, at which ten- 
 dency becomes proof of purpose ; as there is also a 
 point in the accumulation of evidence, at which not 
 to see guilt is in some measure to share it. When 
 deeds admit of no interpretation but one, that one 
 can no longer be honourably avoided. The acts 
 of the Porte, through nine long months, demon- 
 strate a deliberate intention, and a coherent plan. 
 That purpose has been to cover up iniquity ; to baffle 
 inquiry ; to reward prominence in crime ; to punish 
 or discourage humanity among its own agents ; to 
 prolong the reign of terror ; to impress with a 
 steady coherency upon the minds of its Mahometan 
 subjects this but too intelligible lesson for the next 
 similar occasion, do it again. 
 
 I hope that my charge against the Porte is now 
 intelligible and clear. My first duty was to make it 
 so. My second is, to allow that no one should accept 
 it from me as proved, but to ask every one to examine 
 and pronounce upon the proof; which will be drawn 
 principally, indeed almost exclusively, from the 
 official information supplied by British Agents. If 
 I take it as my third duty to look around for some 
 palliation of what appears so monstrous a wicked- 
 ness, I can only find it in this. In what we deem
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 atrocity, the Porte sees only energy. What we 
 think crimes, the Porte holds to be services. To 
 uphold the existing relation of domination on one 
 side, and servitude on the other, by that FORCE, in 
 which all along the Osmanli have lived and moved 
 and had their being, is for the Turk the one great 
 commandment "on which hang all the law and 
 the prophets." Violence and fury, fraud and false- 
 hood, are sanctified when, in circumstances of 
 adequate magnitude, they are addressed to such 
 an end. The utmost refinements of cruelty, the 
 most bestial devices of lust, become either meri- 
 torious or venial, when they are the incidental 
 accompaniments of the good and holy work. All 
 these things, which are terrible to say, are, if true, 
 yet more terrible to leave unsaid. I will there- 
 fore set about the proof; and, to give at once a 
 true view of the scope of the undertaking, I will 
 specify its heads. 
 
 I. When it had become plain, long after the fact, 
 that the Massacres could not be hushed up, in the 
 manner of an everyday occurrence, the Porte at- 
 tempted to veil them by ordering inquiries not 
 judicial, but simply illusory, in the hands of men 
 altogether unfit. 
 
 II. This expedient having failed, the next was to 
 appoint another inquiry under judicial forms, but with 
 ample security, whether in the characters of the men, 
 the forms of proceeding, or the instructions given, or
 
 10 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 possibly from all, against its attaining the ends of 
 justice. Even this inquiry was not extended, for 
 many months, to the North of the Balkan. 
 
 III. The conduct of the insurgents in the rebellion 
 afforded no warrant whatever for the conduct of the 
 Turks in the suppression. 
 
 IY. After that suppression, after all the streams 
 of blood that had been shed, Bulgarians were impri- 
 soned by thousands, and detained in foul dens under 
 the name of prisons, on the vaguest charges of com- 
 plicity in the insurrection. Detained (mostly) for 
 long terms, often, when no charge could be formu- 
 lated against them, they were left to perish in their 
 gaols. Large numbers were condemned and hung : 
 while those who were liberated, or were sent in 
 transit from prison to prison, were subjected to 
 shameful, and in some cases murderous ill-treatment. 
 
 V. While all this was going on, honours and 
 rewards were copiously showered upon the mis- 
 creants, who had distinguished themselves by 
 superior atrocity. 
 
 YI. And, as a just counterpart to the last named 
 proceeding, those Mahometans, who had nobly 
 hindered or slackened the work of blood, sometimes 
 at great risk to themselves, were in every instance 
 either passed over or dismissed. 
 
 YII. We have distinct cases, in which Mahometan 
 Commissioners on the bench shamefully interrupted 
 the proceedings to hinder the course of justice ; and
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 11 
 
 the declaration of the Consul of the United States 
 that Selim Effendi tortured prisoners in gaol to 
 compel them to give the evidence he desired, which 
 was made in September last, has not yet been met. 
 
 VIII. No attempt was made to restore in any 
 sense the dwellings of the people, which had been 
 destroyed wholesale, until there had come a per- 
 emptory diplomatic demand from England, scarcely 
 less than an order. 
 
 IX. When these so-called restorations began, they 
 appear to have been made by the forced labour of 
 the people, principally of Christians already plun- 
 dered and destitute ; with a contribution from the 
 Porte, apparently less than one-tenth of what 
 English alms alone, to say nothing of Russian gifts, 
 have supplied for the destitute, and less than one- 
 hundredth of the ruin which, by its agents, it had 
 wrought. 
 
 X. The extortions of the Government under the 
 name of taxes were still continued in districts, and 
 upon persons, whom their servants had reduced to 
 misery. 
 
 XI. All this time the outrages were also con- 
 tinued ; the same in kind, though on a scale less 
 magnificent and imperial than in the month of May ; 
 and it is a moral certainty, that they continue still. 
 
 XII. Though it was only by a supply of regular 
 forces, under proper command, that security could 
 be re-established, these troops were advisedly kept
 
 12 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 back ; and, when the diplomatic pressure for them 
 was found too strong for direct refusal, a promise 
 to supply them was made and broken. 
 
 XIII. Among all the descriptions, or references, 
 by the Porte, touching these horrible and shameful 
 excesses, there is not found one single word of 
 condemnation or regret. 
 
 XIY. On the contrary, it is officially denied that 
 any excesses at all occurred on the part of the 
 Mahometans. The Commission down to the date of 
 Oct. 30 had not been able so much as to determine 
 that the great massacre of Batak was a criminal 
 transaction. 
 
 XV. When the accused Bulgarians have been 
 hung, and the prisons at length nearly emptied, but 
 proceedings against Turkish criminals hardly begun, 
 and when an Amnesty is demanded for the Chris- 
 tians, the Porte, by a counter-proposal of a general 
 amnesty, seeks to cover its own still unpunished 
 agents. 
 
 XYI. After all the acts of falsehood, concealment, 
 obstruction, and delay have been exhausted, with 
 reward or impunity for the bad, discouragement or 
 dismissal for the good, and the careful maintenance 
 of the reign of terror in the desolated region, it is 
 officially declared by the highest authority, that the 
 proceedings in the suppression of the Bulgarian 
 rising were not worthy of condemnation but of 
 praise.
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 13 
 
 XVII. And it may now be stated as a matter 
 beyond doubt, that the inquiry into the excesses, the 
 granting of which was a concession to pressure, has 
 proved to be a fictitious and pretended inquiry, 
 beginning in obstruction, and ending in mockery. 
 
 The English Government, which on the 21st of 
 September demanded reparation, security, and signal 
 punishment of principal offenders, is disparaged and 
 insulted by the substantial refusal of its demands. 
 
 And I may now again sum up these accusations 
 by saying that, if proved, they show that the 
 Turkish Government has since the Massacres, by 
 word and act, been steadily inculcating this one 
 lesson do.it again. 
 
 Before dealing with the charges specifically, I 
 must premise two or three observations. 
 
 First, the facts are incomplete; that is to say, they 
 are not the whole facts. It is possible that there 
 may be circumstances, unknown to us, which might 
 in some points diminish the force of some among 
 those known. But, in the first place, the known 
 facts (and I have omitted very many) are such 
 that, over and above what is needed for proof, they 
 leave a large surplusage of force. Secondly, they 
 have been collected by men impartial and, in 
 almost every case, officially responsible. Thirdly, 
 it is plain that the great hindrance to a yet fuller 
 development of the case has not been the manu- 
 facture of false complaints by the Bulgarians, but
 
 14 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 the terror of recollection, and the terror of antici- 
 pation, which has made it extremely difficult in many 
 instances to obtain from them any full statements 
 in accusation of their masters.* Fourthly, there is 
 no portion of the evidence which leads to darker 
 inferences, than that which is supplied by the lan- 
 guage of the Porte and of its agents. Again, 
 viewing the marked general character of the facts, 
 the only reasonable supposition is that their further 
 multiplication would only have worsened the case 
 in its quantity ; as to quality, nothing could worsen 
 it. Lastly, I have laboured hard to make myself 
 master of these Papers; but, from their great and 
 miscellaneous mass, and the difficulty of tracing their 
 order, I may in this or that instance have' failed, not 
 wilfully, to state the case with adequate fulness and 
 exactitude. 
 
 Secondly. I hold it to be a reasonable inference 
 from the whole circumstances, and in particular from 
 the conduct of the Porte as an accessary after the 
 fact, that the Bashi Bazouks were originally chosen 
 as the main instruments of repression, together with 
 the Mussulman population, in order that it might 
 be the more effective, that is to say, the more 
 terrible, the more bloody, and the more brutal. For 
 we find that this was the surmise of those best 
 qualified to judge (e.g. Papers I. 432). And again, 
 
 See e. g. Papers I. 524.
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 15 
 
 there is no other reason to be assigned for the 
 employment of the irregulars, and for letting loose 
 the population. There was ample time to supply 
 troops between the first of May, when the first 
 serious events occurred (Papers I. 144-6, and 
 Schuyler,* Section on the Insurrection of May, 
 1876), and the tragedy of Batak, which occurred 
 on the 9th of May. 
 
 To say they were wanted elsewhere, would be 
 ridiculous. Only an insignificant fraction of the 
 army was employed in Bosnia and Herzegovina ; 
 the empire generally was tranquil; and the war 
 with Serbia did not break out until two months 
 after the beginning of the brief revolt. 
 
 At the same time, we have not here the cumu- 
 lative proof from acts anterior to the crisis, which 
 establishes the subsequent sanction and adoption of 
 the Massacres. The light, thrown by that after- 
 conduct upon the prior measures, leaves little room 
 for doubt, that a repression of such a character, as 
 that which actually happened, was within the ori- 
 ginal intentions of the Porte. I state this, however, 
 not as demonstration, but as reasonable inference. 
 
 * It may. be welPto mention that the Eeport of Mr. Schuyler, 
 to which my references are made, is an enlarged and digested 
 form of the document which appears in Papers I. 167. I trans- 
 late from the French version, kindly sent me by the author. 
 It is dated Nov. 20, 1876.
 
 16 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 II. 
 
 THE PEOOR 
 
 I. It would appear that at the outset the Porte 
 was thoroughly satisfied with the Repression, and 
 had nothing to do but to imprison, try, and hang 
 Bulgarians, and to distribute rewards like our War 
 Office and Admiralty after some gallant service. 
 It was very gradually made to understand that 
 there was other work, not indeed to do, but to 
 pretend to do. The first proceeding taken by the 
 Porte in the vindication of justice was the appoint- 
 ment of a Commissioner, as late as July 17, to 
 examine, as was pretended, into crimes committed in 
 May. We read in the Papers of 1876, under that 
 date (III. 376) : " A Turkish functionary of high 
 position has been sent as Extraordinary Commis- 
 sioner to suppress the excesses being committed in 
 Bulgaria. He will be furnished with full powers to 
 inflict summary punishment." 
 
 It is necessary here to consider whether this 
 Grovernment, with its defective organisation, was in 
 real, or only in official, ignorance of the gravity of 
 the case ? 
 
 We now know the proper answer, in connection 
 with a most singular occurrence, which Sir Henry 
 Elliot has mentioned, but not explained.
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 17 
 
 It was on the 26th of last June, that the first 
 questions were put in the two Houses of Parliament 
 to the Government of this country respecting the 
 Bulgarian Atrocities. The answer, certainly given 
 with perfect truth, was to the effect that there was 
 no official information to justify the statements in 
 circulation. But in February, 1877, we became for 
 the first time aware that, twelve days before that 
 date, Yice-Consul Brophy had sent from Bourgas a 
 report, correcting or reversing a former report of 
 June 4, and setting forth fully the horrible massacre 
 of unresisting Bulgarians at Boyadjik by Shefket 
 Pacha. " Of some 2000 men, women, and children, 
 only about 50 escaped." There were the usual ac- 
 companiments of plunder and kidnapping. In the 
 Caza of Bourgas *' brigandage and robbery are, as 
 usual, the order of the day." A man of ninety had 
 been carried to the mountains, another man, who is 
 named, had been burned with hot irons upon the 
 breast, for purposes of extortion. A Commissioner 
 had been sent ; but " the local authorities had already 
 concerted steps to prevent his arriving at the know- 
 ledge of the truth." Such are some of the contents 
 of the despatch which, while England was still in 
 the dark on this vital matter, was calmly slumbering 
 in the pigeon-holes of the Embassy at Constanti- 
 nople. But on the 8th of September, when the 
 Indignation was already at its height, there arrived 
 at the Foreign Office -a despatch from Sir H. Elliot,
 
 18 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 which commenced with the following unimpassioned 
 remark. " The inclosed despatch from the Yice- 
 Consul Brophy appears not to have been forwarded, as 
 it ought to have been, when it was received " (Papers 
 I. 116, 117). 
 
 It had been, however, immediately communicated 
 to Safvet Pacha ; and the business of ineffectual protest 
 was, for the thousandth time, duly recommenced. 
 Of the miscreant Shefket Pacha I treat elsewhere. 
 What I now wish to bring home is this : that within 
 a few days (as it must have been) after the 14th of 
 June the Porte was made aware, on British and 
 official authority, of one of the worst of the Bul- 
 garian Massacres. It had appointed a Commissioner 
 to inquire ; and measures to make the local inquiry 
 useless had already been taken by its own local autho- 
 rities. It was with this knowledge of the scale of the 
 horrors which had been perpetrated, that the Porte 
 appointed Kiani Pacha to make his general inquiry. 
 
 Of the " full powers " to " suppress excesses," and 
 " inflict summary punishment," with which the 
 Parliamentary Papers of 1876 conveniently closed, 
 and on which for a time we fed in delusive hope, 
 we hear no more. But we find Kiani Pacha ac- 
 quainting Mr. Schuyler (see his last Section) that the 
 insurgents had slain a Mudir's wife and daughter ; 
 whereas he had no daughter, and his wife was alive 
 and absent. 
 
 The Porte likewise sent other chosen Agents to
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 19 
 
 report upon the condition of Bulgaria. The most 
 important inquiry, which embraced the Southern 
 Vilayet, was intrusted to Edib Effendi. 
 
 Musurus Pacha, without doubt acting simply as 
 the mouthpiece of his Government, on the 4th of 
 August sends this Report of Edib Effendi, for the 
 Vilayet of Adrianople, to Lord Derby, with the 
 assurance that 
 
 " This conscientious Report exposes in the most 
 impartial manner the latest events of which Bul- 
 garia has been the scene ; it makes the facts appear 
 in their true light, and shows in the most indisput- 
 able manner which side committed those atrocities 
 that have so deeply moved the Sublime Porte and all 
 Europe." (Papers of 1876, No. V. p. 27.) 
 
 And so forth. 
 
 In this paper we hear much of the outrages com- 
 mitted by Bulgarians ; and the Commissioner, in 
 winding up his preposterous account of what hap- 
 pened at Batak, bursts into a noble indignation, and 
 even curses (' Rapport,' p. 11) those who had induced 
 the Bulgarians to rebel. According to him, there 
 was a sanguinary battle, with heavy losses on both 
 sides! According to Baring (I. 154), there was 
 " hardly any loss inflicted on either side in action." 
 Of the massacre, the burning, the heaps of unburied 
 corpses of women and children, there is not a trace 
 in the " conscientious Report " of Edib Effendi. 
 
 Nor is there, according to this worthy, a trace of 
 
 c 2
 
 20 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 any one cruel, disgraceful, or even precipitate act by a 
 Mussulman ; though he tells us of their extraordinary 
 care in sparing women and children (p. 8). But as 
 I am accusing the Turkish G-overnment of deliberate 
 and wholesale falsehood, used to conceal its other 
 and still greater crimes, I will refer more explicitly 
 to his account of the proceedings at Boyadjikevi, in 
 contrast with that of Mr. Baring. 
 
 He says that, in a severe action, most of the houses 
 took fire, and all the cattle attached to them there- 
 upon took refuge with the Turkish soldiery. The 
 losses of the Bulgarians were between 70 and 80 ; no 
 women or children, except one single woman hit by 
 a ball (' Eapport,' p. 13). The number was swelled, 
 by the exaggeration of the villagers, to 100 or 110. 
 
 We turn to Mr. Baring (I. 158), and we find that, 
 out of 139 houses, all were burned but 20 ; 143 
 men and 6 women were massacred ; 13,000 animals 
 were carried off. Mr. Schuyler, at a much later date, 
 gives the official number of the slain (Section on 
 Sliven) at 170, including 2 priests, 8 women, and 8 
 children. The Kaimakam of Yamboli took 120 
 cows for his own share. It is not pretended that at 
 this village any Mussulman had been slain. The 
 cause, which led the villagers to meet together and 
 consider their state, was that some Turks came to 
 extort money on the 24th and 25th of May, and 
 "ravished one man's wife and daughter "(I. 158). 
 
 We cannot therefore be surprised, if the Report
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACBE. 21 
 
 of Edib Effendi exhausted the long-suffering even 
 of Sir Henry Elliot, and was described by him as 
 " entirely untrustworthy ;" if Mr. Baring treats it as 
 " pretty correct " in the part which does not relate 
 to the Massacres, and as false or worthless in what 
 does (I. 155, 166); and if Consul Schuyler (**& Jin.) 
 bluntly characterises it as " a string of falsehoods." 
 
 Such was the official mendacity, by which the 
 Porte, three months after the Massacres, strove to 
 delude Europe and to conceal its crimes. 
 
 II. But the air was stirred disagreeably by strong 
 vibrations from the T 'nglish Parliament and Press, 
 which partially forestalled the noble movement of 
 the people ; and the matter could not rest here ; for, 
 if opinion were too impudently braved, what would 
 become of the moral support that had been officially 
 promised, and the material supp< 1 1 that had been 
 actually given, and not withdra\vii, by the ancient 
 ally on whom Turkey could always depend ? On 
 the 29th of August, Earl Derby thought it necessary 
 to warn the Government at Constantinople of the 
 rising indignation and disgust of the nation : and 
 about September 12 or 13 they must have been put 
 in possession by the post of his despatch of Septem- 
 ber 5. At length, under the compulsion of the 
 'tempest from the West, so late as the 17th Sep- 
 tember, four months after the Massacres, a new Com- 
 mission was appointed to do what we were told had 
 been done in July ; to inquire, and punish the guilty.
 
 22 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 It would be instructive to see the terms of this 
 appointment ; but they have not been supplied 
 (I. 371). 
 
 It was composed of four Mussulmans and four 
 Christians. Among each moiety, says Sir H. Elliot, 
 " were true and resolute men ; but there are others 
 in whom equal confidence cannot be felt." Unfortu- 
 nately, he does not tell us which were which. In 
 my eyes, the appointment of Christians as such is a 
 matter of small moment. What we want is the 
 virtue and courage of the man, not his religious 
 profession. Of the Christian servants of the Porte, 
 some are venal, some are servile. I rather think 
 Blacque Bey is a Christian ; but the name of a 
 Blacque is attached to the shameful document which 
 suppresses the * Courier d' Orient,' and (August 3) 
 speaks of the " pretended excesses " in Bulgaria.* 
 
 What I submit is this ; that Turkey offered a fresh 
 insult to us, and to the whole civilised world, in 
 daring to appoint on this Commission, quce sera tamen 
 respexit inertem, any members, of whom Sir Henry 
 Elliot has to record that confidence could not be 
 reposed in their character and courage (I. 371) : 
 and of whom he does not even say, that they formed 
 a minority in the Commission. 
 
 It was in part to encourage the better-minded 
 
 * Pretendus. ' The Bulgarian Horrors,' p. 29. The subsequent 
 language leaves little room for doubt that pretended, and not 
 alleged, is the true sense of the word.
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 23 
 
 Commissioners against their colleagues, that Mr. 
 Baring was sent to attend the proceedings. Sir H. 
 Elliot also thought it would encourage witnesses to 
 speak, who might otherwise avoid the risk. 
 
 It was only at a later date that the Commission was 
 empowered to include within its scope the Yilayet of 
 the Danube. But it never went there at all. 
 
 We shall see farther on what was the conduct of 
 the Commission. 
 
 III. It may be thought that a defence for the 
 Turks is to be found in the allegations of cruel acts 
 done by the revolted Bulgarians. On this plea, I 
 take leave to assert that there is no such defence ; 
 nor the shadow of it. 
 
 1. Outrages by oppressed inferiors do not excuse 
 like outrages by the race which has held them 
 down, and ground them into debasement, by superior 
 force : much less do they excuse outrages at least 
 a hundredfold in amount, and immeasurably dif- 
 ferent in their savage and filthy brutality. 
 
 2. Assertions from Turkish agents of outrages by 
 Bulgarians are of no more weight, than their denials 
 of outrages by Turks, which are shown by impartial 
 reports to be valueless. It is remarkable, however, 
 that the Turks themselves deal mainly in generalities 
 on the subject, and allege (Schuyler, sub Jin.) not 
 more than twelve deaths of Mahometan women and 
 children. 
 
 3. The assertions by Christian Commissioners of
 
 24 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 the Porte (I. 198), that the insurgents committed 
 deeds of atrocity, are of no higher value, until we 
 know that they were men of integrity and of 
 courage, who would hoth wish and dare to speak 
 the truth. They are also almost uniformly vague 
 and without particulars. 
 
 4. Vice- Consul Dupuis has indeed reported 
 (August 7, I. p. 51), that at Otlou-kevi the Bul- 
 garians massacred eighty Mussulmans. But this 
 appears only to prove his own credulity. Mr. 
 Baring, in a document (I. 150) which "he thinks 
 may be relied on," gives the number slain at Otlou- 
 kevi by the insurgents at 14. The Christians killed 
 at the same place, according to a detailed list, were 
 763: viz. 
 
 Men 262 
 
 Women 284 
 
 Children 217 
 
 / 
 Mr. Dupuis also reports two cases which, if they 
 
 happened, were truly atrocious : that a boy had his 
 fore-arms flayed ; that a child was cut to pieces (and 
 his flesh offered for sale to whom ?) Also that there 
 were " unspeakable atrocities " on females. Mr. 
 Baring, in a much fuller and more careful statement 
 (I. 156), reports not one of these things ; but says, 
 two women were killed, one of them fighting. 
 Mr. Schuyler, in summing up, mentions the same 
 number, informs^' us that both were killed in a
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 25 
 
 skirmish, and adds the remarkable words, as ap- 
 plicable to the entire insurrection : 
 
 " No woman, no child among the Turks was killed 
 in cold blood. No woman was violated ; no Turk 
 tortured." 
 
 Mr. Dupuis ought, it would appear, either to sup- 
 port his statement, or to withdraw it. I see no cause, 
 however, for ascribing it to intentional partiality. 
 
 5. Finally, we have learned from Mr. Baring, that 
 the document called ' Catechism ' or ' Instructions ' 
 of the Bulgarian leaders is authentic. In that docu- 
 ment the orders are express (I. 194); "no violence, 
 no plunder, for men who submit ; the aged, the 
 women, and the children, are to be watched over, as 
 much as the honour and life of our own people." 
 (Nos. 12, 13.) 
 
 Mr. Baring sums up by saying on this part of the 
 case : " A small minority of the population committed 
 reprehensible acts, which merited punishment " 
 (I. 166). 
 
 IY. The proceedings of the Porte against the 
 perpetrators of massacre were slow, late, and re- 
 luctant ; those against the Bulgarians were brisk, 
 lively, and spontaneous. On July 20 (I. 12) many 
 Bulgarians had already been hanged for defending 
 their houses and families against the Basbi Bazouk. 
 Though it is impossible to obtain any full view of 
 them from the Papers, it is also clear that the pro- 
 ceedings were wholesale.
 
 26 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 Feeling the real importance of this count in the 
 indictment, and of the contrasted proceedings against 
 those who executed the Vengeance, I requested in 
 the House of Commons on the 12th of February that 
 the Government would endeavour, for greater accu- 
 racy, to put together succinctly the figures, so far 
 as they might be at their command. With great 
 courtesy, they sent immediately a telegram to Con- 
 stantinople for the purpose ; but as yet (March 10) 
 without result. 
 
 Mr. Baring has given us certain figures for the 
 districts of Philippopolis and Adrianople ; at the first 
 1956 were imprisoned, and at the second he believes 
 about 1200 (I. 159). To the northward, at Tirnovo, 
 430 were imprisoned (I. 162). At Philippopolis, 900 
 were still in prison when Mr. Baring came ; on the 
 6th of September there were still 104 (I. 254). The 
 total number of arrests, following upon the massacre 
 of 15,000, may have been from four to five thousand. 
 
 As regards treatment in prison, Mr. Dupuis gives 
 us the narrative of the priest, Peter Patcharutoff 
 (I. 75). Charged as a rebel, he denied it. No 
 evidence was produced. He was beaten, threatened 
 with knives and with death by his " escort " of 
 zaptiehs and Bashi Bazouks ; compelled to save his 
 life to sign a confession ; and, on retracting it, he was 
 first chained to the prison window, then shut up for 
 five days in a sort of cupboard, where it was impossible 
 to stretch his limbs or to sleep.
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 27 
 
 The Bulgarians of Philippopolis asserted (I. 147), 
 that the greater part of the evidence was obtained by 
 torture, while the Turks denied it. Three men told 
 their own experience to Mr. Baring. 
 
 One was kept seventy-eight days in prison, nine- 
 teen of them in a cell with but just room to lie down. 
 Declaring he had no evidence to give, he was par- 
 tially hung, his toes just touching the ground, and 
 kept .so till he fainted. He was never examined ; 
 and at length was released (I. 147). 
 
 Another priest stated that he was confined for 
 twenty-eight days, seven of them in a privy, and for 
 three of them without either food or water. 
 
 A Greek physician who visited the prisons, thinks 
 that, if there had been torture of these kinds, complaint 
 would have been made to him. I am concerned to 
 say that in my opinion a Greek, in Turkish employ- 
 ment at Philippopolis, was about the last man to 
 whom a Bulgarian would be likely to complain. 
 
 Mr. Calvert some time later (September 6, I. 254), 
 appears to have cleared up this subject : for he says 
 that " the testimony of numerous eye-witnesses," as 
 well as of sufferers, established " that violent means 
 were used to extort the required confessions." In 
 the case of three men from Tchirpan, a Turk con- 
 firmed the testimony (ibid.). 
 
 We now come to the savage vengeance of the 
 Porte through its tribunals ; not tribunals appointed 
 to try the authors of the Massacre, but those which
 
 28 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 dealt with charges of complicity in the poor and 
 feeble rising, 
 
 In the Vilayet of the Danube, the movement had 
 been very slight. Chakir Bey, in his Report dated 
 July 2 (p. 7), says the losses of the Mussulmans 
 consisted in some children and some shepherds killed 
 near Yeni Kevy, with some wounded in actual 
 conflict. The Prosecutor for the Government in the 
 proceedings reported by Consul Eeade on Aug. 21 
 (I. 53) charged two men capitally. But the Court 
 condemned three ; and they were executed at the 
 end of the same sitting. In one case the cord broke 
 three times ; and the fourth time the man was par- 
 tially held up by the soldiers, that it might not 
 break again. This is not lawful execution, but death 
 by torture. The other two were " most inhumanly 
 treated" on their way to execution. Other severe 
 sentences were pronounced ; and " a few were 
 acquitted." 
 
 The special tribunal of Philippopolis had so soon 
 as Aug. 5 condemned to hard labour 65 Bulgarians 
 and to death 27, of whom 25 had been executed. 
 At Adrianople 18 were hung (I. 159). Two men, 
 wholly unconnected with the revolt, were seized by 
 Fazli Pacha, who got drunk, and ordered them to be 
 hung immediately (I. 161). One officer refused 
 obedience ; another more docile was readily found, 
 and the act was promptly performed. Twenty-two 
 were hung at Tirnovo (I. 162). Twenty-five died in
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 29 
 
 prison at Philippopolis. It is plain that we are to 
 count in hundreds the lives destroyed by sentence 
 or by ill-usage. Mr. Baring stated the hangings 
 (Oct. 30, p. 668) at about a hundred. These trials 
 were but an afterpiece to the Vengeance, and an. 
 afterpiece in perfect keeping with the principal 
 performance. 
 
 Hanging, on a smaller scale, was still proceeding 
 in November (I. 752). 
 
 Mr. Baring says that whether the prisoners were 
 tortured or not, there is no doubt that they were, 
 while being conveyed to Philippopolis, most brutally 
 ill-treated. Four hundred men, heavily chained, 
 were " mercilessly beaten by their escort, and pelted 
 and insulted by the Mussulman mob." Prisoners 
 were beaten by zaptiehs, even on the way from the 
 prison to the court. Of eighty sent from Philippo- 
 polis to Sofia, five died on the road (I. 147). With- 
 in the prison, 265 men were confined for four days 
 in a bath, without the slightest attempt at drainage, 
 and with such a stench, that the guards could not 
 sit even in the ante-room, but remained in the street. 
 Nami Effendi, First-Secretary to the Government, 
 found the room-doors within the khans open on 
 account of the heat : he ordered them to be shut. 
 The state of things had been mitigated by July 21st 
 (I. 148). 
 
 On August 11 (I. 61) it was promised by the 
 Porte that all the prisoners not actually under trial,
 
 30 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 except ringleaders, should be set at liberty without 
 delay. But it was on November 1 that we find 
 the trials of the remaining Bulgarian prisoners, who 
 had been 'in prison since May, were only about to 
 begin (I. 670). Finally (II. 60), on December 4, 
 Mr. Baring hopes that in a short time all the prisoners 
 will be set free. 
 
 Y . I come to the important subject of the liberal 
 rewards bestowed by the Turkish Government upon 
 its most distinguished miscreants, to encourage them 
 in their profession. 
 
 And as it is desirable, without neglecting others, 
 to concentrate attention on one conspicuous case, let 
 us state, at least partially, that of G-eneral Shefket 
 Pacha. 
 
 As the praise of a certain early Christian was in 
 all the churches, so the infamy of Shefket Pacha has 
 sounded throughout Christendom.* It is enough to 
 refer to the reports of Baring and Schuyler, and to 
 my slight sketch from Yice-Consul Brophy (see sup., 
 p. 17). " The atrocity of his proceedings," as reported 
 on June 14, says Sir H. Elliot, " has been fully con- 
 firmed by all subsequent inquiries" (I. 116). "At 
 Boyadjik there was not a semblance of revolt, the in- 
 habitants were perfectly peaceable" (I. 159). Every 
 house was burned except 20 : 143 men and 6 women 
 massacred (I. 158). For this service he received a 
 
 * Eespecting Shefket Pacha, see I. 92, 116, 158-9, 257-8, 417, 
 729, 753 ; II. 131. Schuyler, Section on Sliven.
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 31 
 
 "high place in the Palace" (I. 159). Under pres- 
 sure from without, he was dismissed on Sept. 2 
 (I. 92) ; but he was almost immediately (Sir H. 
 Elliot, Sept. 26, I. 417) named a Member of the 
 Military Council ; and he is still retained upon it, 
 although frequent representations have been made 
 to the Porte that, in the face of the grave charges 
 against him, his employment, till he had cleared 
 himself, was " almost a defiance of public opinion." 
 
 As if all this were not enough, recently it was 
 stated by the * Times ' Correspondent that Shef ket 
 had been appointed to a command on the Danube. 
 The statement was contradicted here, in answer to a 
 question in Parliament. But, says the Correspondent 
 (' Times,' March 1, 1877), it had been published in 
 two Turkish Journals on Jan. 29 and 31, on Feb. 12 in 
 the ' Courier d'Orient ' and the ' Phare du Bosphore,' 
 and on Feb. 13 in the semi-official * Turquie.' And 
 all without contradiction or notice on the spot from 
 the Censors of the press. It is a fair inference, that 
 this further appointment was intended ; and that, 
 had not public attention been drawn to the subject, 
 it would have been made. 
 
 Meantime, the General is not without defenders ; 
 and the ' Times ' (March 1, 1877) further quotes 
 the following passage of supreme eulogy from the 
 'Ve'rite" of February 12, 1877, which is described 
 as a Government organ. It refers to accusations of 
 conspiracy made against this " important personage."
 
 32 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 " S. E. Shefket Pacha, entre autres, est nn des 
 meilleurs officiers de 1'armee, dont le caractere, le 
 me'rite personnel, et le passe, sont les plus surs garants ; 
 son zele, son patriotisme, et sa fidelite envers son pays 
 militent trop en sa faveur pour qu'une enquete ait 
 e'te jugee necessaire." 
 
 The fact that this paramount offender should have 
 remained unpunished, rewarded, free, becomes yet 
 more astonishing when we remember not only his place 
 in the reports of Baring and Schuyler, but the efforts 
 of Sir Henry Elliot, from the middle of June on- 
 wards, and at the very time when, according to Lord 
 Beaconsfield, Turkey had no other wish than to take 
 the advice of England, to obtain some measure of 
 justice in this instance. The Porte did not attempt to 
 show his innocence. She had in the Salonica case tried 
 and retried, sentenced and resentenced, her own 
 official servants under French and German pressure ; 
 and now we, the darling Power, could not obtain the 
 smallest modicum of justice against Shefket. There 
 is but one explanation. He was an agent ; there 
 was a principal behind. Who is that principal ? 
 Did Abdul Kerim, the General of the Army in 
 Serbia, prevent his being sent to Philippopolis to be 
 tried, and receive in consequence the thanks of his 
 harem? ('Times' Corresp., March 1, 1877.) Does 
 Shefket carry a telegraphic order of that same 
 General to burn the village of Slivno, which Haidar 
 spared, and was thereafter dismissed ? Is he or is he
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 33 
 
 not a relative of Midhat ? All this may be capable of 
 disproof. Why was it not put to the test, by sending 
 the sanguinary miscreant to Philippopolis for trial ? 
 
 These ideas are not the mere offspring of careless- 
 ness or malignity. Sir Henry Elliot, incredulous to 
 the last degree of any charge against a Turkish 
 functionary, but ever honourable and plain-spoken 
 when he sees the truth, returned on the 26th of 
 November to the subject he had been so wearily and 
 hopelessly treating for many months, and spoke 
 to the Minister of War as follows (I. 729) : 
 
 " I told him that, as the General professed to have 
 in his pocket orders which would show that he had 
 done no more than carry out his instructions, his 
 continued impunity would lead to a belief in the 
 truth of his assertion." 
 
 From May to September, from September to 
 November, from November to March, his impunity 
 has continued. Could the wit of man have devised 
 a more eloquent instruction to "do it again ? " * 
 
 But though Shefket may be considered the 
 Choregos of iniquity, some of those, who for like 
 distinctions obtained other rewards, must not remain 
 unnoticed. 
 
 Hakki Pacha, who, when acting as a judge, took 
 
 * He appears to have succeeded in diffusing round him a con- 
 genial tone ; for Vice-Consul Brophy reports that he heard a 
 Secretary of his " declare that the whole race of Bulgarians, inno- 
 cent or guilty, ought to be exterminated." I. 10. 
 
 D
 
 34 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 part against the Bulgarians whom he tried, was 
 appointed in September to be Governor of Widdin 
 (I. 296, 331). The Ambassador is desired to warn 
 the Porte against the probable consequences of so 
 unwise an appointment. The result, as usual, is nil. 
 
 Achmet Aga, in acknowledgment of his monstrous 
 cruelty and iniquity at Batak, received the order of 
 the Medjidje (1. 155). Presently a storm arose. He 
 remained long at large ; but it was at length found 
 necessary to arrest him, Sept. 2 (I. 92), and to try 
 him. After much shuffling, he was, on the 27th of 
 December, condemned to death. Bulgarian Chris- 
 tians, when condemned, were executed forthwith. 
 Achmet Aga still lived at the date of the latest news. 
 
 For the pillage and burning of Yenikur, Nedjib 
 Effendi was decorated (I. 161), so was Toussoun 
 Bey, the hero of Dervent (or Klissoura) (I. 165, 522, 
 and Schuyler). Hafiz Pacha (I. 165) received a 
 command in Serbia (I. 165). 
 
 Many others are denounced by Mr, Baring (I. 156, 
 255), and Schuyler (sub Jin.). Not one has been exe- 
 cuted. The Yali of Adrianople has been dismissed, 
 and there have been a few sentences to hard labour. 
 We have not the smallest security that they will be 
 carried into effect. 
 
 The statement of Sir H. Elliot, that Shef ket Pacha 
 alleged he carried with him justifying orders, is thus 
 enlarged in the report of Schuyler.* 
 
 * Section on Sliven.
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 35 
 
 "Shefket Pacha quitted Boyardjik with the in- 
 tention of subjecting the surrounding villages to a 
 similar fate, and produced a telegram to that effect 
 from the Serdar-ekrem Abdul Keriin Pacha, which 
 ordered the destruction of those places." 
 
 Here is a positive, public, and official statement ; to 
 which we hear of no contradiction. 
 
 YI. My sixth charge is that those Mahometans, 
 who had hindered or slackened the work of blood, 
 sometimes at great risk to themselves, were in every 
 case either passed over or dismissed. 
 
 There is hardly a more touching chapter in the 
 whole sad story, than the conduct of these good 
 Mahometans. From the bottom of our hearts let us 
 cry, "May God reward them!" Having the same 
 temptations as others to indulge the spirit of re- 
 venge, yet, in the teeth of their co-religionists, and 
 despite the well-understood sentiments of their 
 Government, they did their duty in the day of need ; 
 and in the Day of Judgment, without doubt, their 
 doing it will be remembered. 
 
 It is a pleasure, alas ! a solitary pleasure, to re- 
 cord them. 
 
 Aziz Pacha, who was unfavourable to the arm- 
 ing of the Mussulman population, was recalled from 
 Philippopolis (I. 146). 
 
 Hamid Pacha, who succeeded him, saved the city, 
 says Mr. Baring (ibid.\ by his firmness and im- 
 partiality. 
 
 D 2
 
 36 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 Haydar Effendi, the Mutessarif of Slimnia (I. 383 ; 
 I. 166, 247 ; II. 208, 210) was spoken of by the 
 Christians "in terms of the highest praise," and 
 delivered that Caza or district from devastation. He 
 then frustrated the design of Shefket Pacha to burn 
 the village of Slivno ; and he has been dismissed, 
 according to the Correspondent of the ' Times ' 
 (March 1, 1877), from his place. 
 
 Yamboli was saved from the destruction intended 
 by Shefket Pacha through the interference of " a 
 Mussulman named Hafiz Effendi, a most noble and 
 liberal-minded man. Braving the opinion of his co- 
 religionists, he took as many Christian families as 
 he could into his house, and, going to Shefket, 
 insisted that the plundering should be stopped " 
 (I. 158). 
 
 The case of Hadji Shaban requires a longer notice. 
 He was Mudir of Kazan. Hearing that 300 Bashi 
 Bazouks were marching upon the village of Vir- 
 bitza, he started, alone, to overtake them. Two 
 Christian peasants came into view. The ruffians 
 began to observe one to another that it would be as 
 well to kill them, for they might have money upon 
 them. Hadji Shaban thereupon halted them, and 
 went himself over to the two peasants. Hearing 
 murmurs, he boldly pointed his gun at the 300, and 
 ordered them to pass on. Abashed, as is constantly 
 the case with the Turk, by manful conduct, the 
 body marched forwards the fifty paces he had com-
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 37 
 
 manded, and Hadji Shaban took the rescued peasants 
 home. Now mark the Vice-Consul's conclusion 
 (I. 383). " Shortly afterwards, Hadji Shaban was 
 dismissed from his post ; I do not know for what 
 reason." 
 
 In the district of Tournova (or Tirnovo ?), after 
 600 Christians had been destroyed on the side of the 
 people, and six Mussulmans on the side of the 
 Government, only twenty-four Bulgarians were 
 executed under judicial sentence. But this number 
 " would have been at least tripled," says Mr. Baring, 
 had it not been that Ali Shefik Bey, the President of 
 the Commission, was " a just man," and did what he 
 could on the side of mercy (I. 162). 
 
 Eshrif Pacha, Vali of Salonica, was indefatigable 
 in his efforts to obtain the deliverance of the women 
 and children kidnapped from Batak (II. 81). 
 
 Ismail Effendi, sent to Isladi to recover the stolen 
 cattle, was met by a proclamation from the authori- 
 ties of the place that any man who claimed cattle, 
 and failed to establish his claim, would be punished. 
 He left to report the facts, and was sent back. 
 Here we lose sight of him (II. 278). 
 
 Others, named by Vice-Consul Brophy for good 
 service, are Ahmet Effendi, at Slimnia ; Ismail Bey, 
 at Karnabad ; Ibrahim Aga, at Aidos (I. 247). 
 
 I close this head with an extract from Mr. 
 Baring's Eeport of September 1st. His list, framed 
 at that date, is of course not exhaustive.
 
 38 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 " Those, who have committed atrocities, have been 
 rewarded ; while those, who have endeavoured to 
 protect the Christians from the fury of the Bashi 
 Bazouks and others, have been passed over with 
 contempt. 
 
 " For example : 
 
 " Shefket Pacha holds high office in the Palace. 
 " Hafiz Pacha has a command in Serbia. 
 "Achmet Agha has been decorated; so have 
 Toussoun Bey, and Nedjib Effendi, Kaimakam 
 of Plevna. 
 
 " On the other hand, has any reward been given 
 to Hafiz Effendi, who saved Yamboli ; to the Mute- 
 velli of Karlovo ; to Husni Effendi, commander of 
 the troops at Yamboli, who saved those places ; to 
 Rustem Effendi, Yuzbachi at Tournova, who, having 
 fought against insurgents really in arms, saved the 
 prisoners from the fury of the mob; or to Haidar 
 Effendi, Mutessarif of Slimnia ? " (I. 165). 
 
 The answer is, No ! and the reason is plain. The 
 miscreants were rewarded, the humane and just 
 were treated, in the words of Mr. Baring, " with 
 contempt," in perfect consistency with the whole 
 method of the conduct of the Porte since the rising, 
 and for the more emphatic inculcation of the lesson 
 to do it again. 
 
 Many times (e.g. I. 28, 729, and 581) the Porte, 
 with its usual and incomparable hardihood, has 
 pleaded imperfect information as an excuse for the
 
 LESBONS IN MASSACRE. 39 
 
 honours and preferments bestowed on the miscreants. 
 In what strangely crooked channels must this im- 
 perfect information have run, when it led the Govern- 
 ment both to pass over or punish all the good men, 
 and to reward all, so far as we know, who were con- 
 spicuously bad ! 
 
 This imperfection, however, was removed on the 
 7th of October. On that day, not through his own 
 exertions, but by information from the British 
 Ambassador, Safvet Pacha was made aware (I. 488) 
 who were the good Turks, that had nobly striven for 
 humanity and justice. Five months have elapsed 
 since the list was supplied ; and we do not find that, 
 even for decency, or even to lull suspicion, so much 
 as one among these good men has been re-appointed 
 or rewarded. Is it possible that circumstantial proof 
 can further go ? 
 
 YII. I have touched on the character of the 
 Commission ; I now come to its conduct. 
 
 On the 21st of October Sir H. Elliot (I. 581) 
 gives an account of an interview with the Grand 
 Vizir. 
 
 "I said that Mr. Baring's Reports showed that 
 the Commission, in conducting this inquiry, were 
 desirous of favouring the accused, rather than of 
 eliciting the truth." 
 
 The Grand Yizir's language in reply was " not 
 satisfactory." 
 
 On the 5th of October (I. 521) Mr. Baring had 
 conversed with the whole of the Commissioners. AH
 
 40 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 of them told him the relations of Mussulmans and 
 Christians had become excellent ; that Achmet Aga 
 (since condemned to death) had by his promptitude 
 averted a great public calamity : the fact, that the 
 Bulgarians feared to move about, was admitted ; but 
 the reason was that, " knowing themselves to be 
 guilty of all sorts of excesses, they shrank from 
 meeting their Mahometan neighbours." 
 
 We have here a tolerably just measure of the 
 character of these judicial functionaries : and it even 
 seems to include the so-called good, as well as the bad. 
 
 With reference to the great case of Batak, Mr. 
 Baring proceeds : 
 
 "The Commission attaches great value to the 
 evidence of some Turks, and of some Bulgarians of 
 another village : but they appear to treat with 
 contempt that which is offered by inhabitants of 
 Batak itself" (I. 522). 
 
 Otlou-kevi, Avrat-Alan, and other villages had 
 not yet been visited : Dervent (or Klissoura) had, 
 but only one old woman's evidence was taken down. 
 Other witnesses were to be summoned to Philip- 
 popolis (I. 522), where it was apparently a practice 
 of the Commission to keep the impoverished people 
 waiting for an indefinite time (I. 583). Why the 
 evidence was not taken down at Dervent seems 
 pretty plain. 
 
 "In this village the inhabitants certainly spoke 
 out manfully, in spite of the presence of their au- 
 thorities " (I. 522).
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 41 
 
 Now as to the capacity of the Commissioners. 
 It appears (I. 582) that Ikiades Bey " was the only 
 member of the Commission who really knew how to 
 examine, the .others being utterly inexperienced ;" 
 except Selim Effendi, of whom I shall have enough 
 to say further on. 
 
 Ikiades Bey examined Achmet Aga, the hero of 
 Batak, with great skill; but, says Mr. Baring 
 (I. 582) : 
 
 "I regret to say he was frequently interrupted 
 by the Mahometan members ; to such an extent, 
 that at one moment he refused to proceed." 
 
 The most atrocious charge, however, that has 
 been raised in connection with the conduct of the 
 Commission, was that of Mr. Schuyler, against Selim 
 Effendi. I will shortly relate the circumstances, so 
 far as I know them. 
 
 Mr. Schuyler and the Correspondent of the ' Daily 
 News' ('Daily News,' Sept. 14, 1876) charged on 
 Selim Effendi, a Commissioner, that before the trials 
 he had visited the prisoners in their gaols and made 
 use of torture to procure from them such evidence as 
 he desired. 
 
 To this accusation I referred in a letter of Sept. 
 14th to the ' Daily News,' published on Sept. 16th. 
 
 At a later period, I received a letter from Selim 
 Effendi, written in perfectly becoming terms, and 
 complaining, as if innocent he might well do, 
 of so grievous a charge. He entered into details,
 
 42 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 the whole of which were connected with the forms 
 in the Court, not to acts before the trials. He 
 pointed to these forms, as clearly demonstrating that 
 nothing of the kind could have taken place. 
 
 I lost no time in forwarding his letter to the 
 * Daily News,' that it might have the advantage of 
 immediate publicity, and it was at once printed by 
 the Editor (Dec. 19, 18Y6) ; but he very properly 
 pointed out that the charge related to one thing, 
 and the defence to another. 
 
 I pointed out this remarkable fact in a letter to 
 Selim Effendi, dated Dec. 16, and published in an 
 English version on that day by the same journal ; 
 I explained who were the real authors of the charge, 
 and expressed my expectation that he would at once 
 address himself to the consideration of it. 
 
 Since that time nearly three months have elapsed ; 
 but not another word has, to my knowledge, pro- 
 ceeded from Selim Effendi. 
 
 Consul Schuyler, however, informs me that he on 
 his side intends to produce evidence in proof of his 
 charge. 
 
 YIII. The failures, excesses, and crimes of the 
 Porte are not commonly prompted from without ; but 
 the ideas of duty, justice, mercy, are purely exotic, 
 and, as it were, mechanically, if at all, infused into 
 the system. I have not found from the Papers that 
 in May, or June, or July, or August, it had occurred 
 to the Turkish Government that some assistance
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 43 
 
 ought to be afforded to its houseless, plundered, 
 and be it remembered unaccused, subjects. First 
 (I believe) on the 25th of September (I. 316), we 
 learn, on Turkish authority, that a sum of money 
 had been sent into Bulgaria. But this was four 
 days after * the peremptory despatch of Lord Derby 
 had been written, in which (I. 238) the restoration 
 of buildings, and of industries, was demanded."} 1 
 
 IX. It is, then, four, nay, more nearly five, months 
 after the Massacres, when we begin to hear of the 
 restorations. To repair the devastations of every 
 kind, apparently of a hundred times the amount, 
 the Porte, under the extremest pressure, slowly 
 supplied a sum of 18,000 Turkish pounds (I. 316) 
 = about 16,000/. : and ordered the people to find and 
 carry the wood of which the houses were to be built. 
 Mussulmans and Christians were alike included in 
 this command : the latter impoverished and plun- 
 dered, the former (as a rule) untouched, or enriched 
 by spoil. Mr. Baring says : " I fear it is not too 
 much to say that the greater part of this forced 
 labour will fall on Bulgarians, who can ill afford to 
 give it" (1.430, 431). 
 
 * I take it for granted that the substance of the important 
 despatch of September 21 was made known in anticipation or 
 through Musurus Pacha by telegraph. 
 
 j" The Turks might certainly have retorted upon Lord Derby 
 the strange plea he had used in May. When they had spent far 
 less, he objected to a demand of this kind in the Berlin Memo- 
 randum, on the ground that Turkey had no money to meet it. 
 See Papers of 1876.
 
 44 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 To find materials, and bring them to the spot, 
 was imposed upon the rayahs, who could not move 
 out in safety to seek for them : and the cost of resto- 
 ration was" actually entered as a charge against 
 those who were thought likely to have at a future 
 day the means of paying for it (1. 525). From those 
 who had means means to pay a second time for 
 their own houses payment was exacted at once: 
 and thus was the work of restoration performed by 
 the Government ! 
 
 The Christian inhabitants of Peshtera were 
 ordered to provide at Begha 4800 beams of wood, 
 or about eight beams for each able-bodied male 
 (I. 525). A like requisition was made on the 
 Mahometans, but they were rich with plunder, the 
 Christians had only the roof over their heads. 
 
 And how was the work carried on ? Mr. Baring 
 tells us on the 8th of October, that of forty-three 
 Turkish houses in the place, no less than forty were 
 then rebuilt or were in course of it, "not a single 
 Christian house (out of sixty-one) had been touched " 
 (I. 526). 
 
 All that was wanted to make the scheme of these 
 restorations perfect, was supplied by placing over 
 them AH Bey, as a superintendent. Mr. Baring 
 says : 
 
 " If the Commission wished to select a man, whose 
 name would inspire terror in the hearts of the Bul- 
 garians, a most admirable selection has been made " 
 (I. 670 ; compare 669).
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 45 
 
 Had there been a spark of human feeling in the 
 breast of the Turkish Government, it would have 
 endeavoured to make palpable to the people the sense 
 of a desire to do justice, and a moral change. But, 
 in point of wantonness, the deeds which followed the 
 great Vengeance almost exceeded those which were 
 included in it. Thus about the middle of July, 
 before we had even learned officially any appreciable 
 portion of the truth, irregulars forwarded by rail 
 from Adrianople to the seat of war amused them- 
 selves " in many places " (I. 13) by firing from 
 the train on such Bulgarians as dared to labour 
 in the fields, and even women, as well as men, 
 were wounded in this manner. 
 
 True, however, to the arts of falsehood, the Porte 
 continued to send forth anodyne assurances ; and, 
 when Sir Henry Elliot had been fairly choked with 
 them, assured the British Government through 
 Musurus Pacha (Nov. 23, I. 716) that all that was 
 needful had been done. Houses rebuilt ; carpets, 
 victuals, blankets distributed ; peasants supplied with 
 agricultural implements and advances in money. 
 And all this out of a fund of 16,000/. 
 
 On the 21st of November (II. 265), according to 
 Turkish account, only 1598 houses out of 5300 had 
 been rebuilt. The sum of the matter, under this 
 head, then, is that to the free action of the Porte 
 there is due nothing whatever ; that what has been 
 done was extorted by Lord Derby ; that it has been
 
 46 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 small in amount, late in time, partial in distribution, 
 and a new instrument of oppression to many who 
 had already suffered much. 
 
 X. Although the idea of restoration or alleviation 
 in any form does not seem to have occurred to the 
 Turkish mind, one department of the State at least 
 did not forget Bulgaria ; that was the Taxing De- 
 partment. 
 
 On September 20, Consul Reade at Rustchuk hears 
 that "the war and other taxes are being peremptorily 
 levied ; and that many who have lost their all, and 
 cannot of course pay, are treated with great 
 severity " (I. 415). 
 
 He adds, at that date, he is convinced that a 
 system prevails which, " if the insurrection should 
 be renewed, will bring on a far worse state of things 
 than hitherto." 
 
 By September 20, this demand had been " sus- 
 pended " (I. 418) in that district. But at Panagou- 
 richta, writes Consul Schuyler, where the local 
 industry was entirely ruined, the people were forced 
 to pay the usual taxes, and to make good the 
 damage done by the Turkish troops. They had been 
 so careless as to burn a granary belonging to a tax- 
 gatherer, and the inhabitants were required to bear 
 the loss. ( Repression.) 
 
 XI. My eleventh head of charge is on the con- 
 tinuance of the outrages, through many weary 
 months after the Massacres. And here the only
 
 LES80NS IN MASSACRE. 47 
 
 difficulty is how to escape from overwhelming the 
 reader with the abundance of the evidence. 
 
 In July, writes Vice-Consul Dupuis on the 20th 
 (I. 12), after all that had occurred, there was a fresh 
 levy of Bashi Bazouks at Hasskevi. 
 
 " After committing excesses in that town, which 
 ought to have been sufficient warning to the autho- 
 rities, they were suffered to depart for Philippopolis. 
 The Gaza of Hasskevi, and the Makie of Kinoush, 
 " which had escaped, comparatively speaking unhurt, 
 the former razzia of the Bashi Bazouks," " were des- 
 tined this time to become the scene of new outrages, 
 and fresh horrors." 
 
 He then describes m the careful organisation, under 
 which these ruffians conducted the business of plunder. 
 
 Mr. Keade, who on Aug. 11 reported from Rust- 
 chuk the hangings of Bulgarians, on the 15th 
 reports the gross maltreatment of a boy, including 
 the " beating him unmercifully over the head," by a 
 " regular," that is to say, a Turkish marine officer ; 
 which I name, because he happened himself to 
 witness it. He reported it to the Pasha, who " did 
 nothing whatever" (I. 66). 
 
 On the 1 9th, he mentions that he has " every now 
 and then" reports of robbery, violence, and often 
 murder by the Circassians ; a few days before, of six 
 Bulgarians murdered by them. No Bulgarian dare 
 move about, unless with a Turkish guard, " whom 
 he has to pay heavily." "I have over and over
 
 48 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 again spoken to the Pasha on the subject, but to no 
 purpose" (I. 67). 
 
 Mr. Brophy, on Aug. 18, reports from Bourgas 
 (I. 117) how on July 21 eight Circassians attacked a 
 Bulgarian family at midnight. The father and son 
 were pricked with daggers to obtain money ; the 
 daughter, of thirteen or fourteen, was twice violated, 
 the second time " before her father's eyes." He has 
 heard, but is not quite certain, that the girl was 
 dead. Other outrages were committed on Aug. 3 
 or 4; and on the 12th, when four Circassians, on a 
 sheep-stealing excursion, fired at the two shepherds. 
 One was killed, the other not expected to live. 
 
 On Aug. 26 Mr. Brophy writes from Bourgas 
 (I. 247) : " On every side the Bulgarians are robbed, 
 beaten, or killed, by their Circassian or Turkish 
 neighbours. The rayahs are in many places afraid 
 to go to their fields to plough, or to the mill to get 
 their corn ground. The Mussulmans of all races 
 seem to consider that it is lawful to despoil the 
 * infidel ' in every way, and, if the ' infidel ' dare to 
 resist, to murder him." 
 
 With much more to a like effect ; and with a 
 notice of some honourable exceptions " among 
 ofiicials and private gentlemen." 
 
 Observe that these reports are from a portion of 
 Bulgaria hardly implicated in the rising. Let us 
 now pass to the south of the Balkans. 
 
 Mr. Baring reports on Sept. 26, four months after
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 49 
 
 the Massacres, " no visible improvement has taken 
 place in the condition of the Bulgarian villagers." 
 The people were taken from their own grounds, to exe- 
 cute forced labour for the Turks, in a case which he 
 names, and he is assured the same goes on through- 
 out the Province (I. 431). On the next day he 
 writes thus from Tatar Bazardjik (I. 432) : " Not a 
 day passes without the rayahs being insulted, 
 threatened, and made to feel their inferiority." On 
 the same day, Acting V. C. Calvert reports (I. 430) : 
 " The inhabitants of the burnt villages stand so 
 much in dread of the Pomaks,* that they dare not go 
 to the forests to cut wood .for new dwellings ; whilst 
 the Pomaks make continual raids on the shelterless 
 people, and take what few things they possess." 
 
 Passing again to the North, we find that Consul 
 Reade on the 5th of October reports thus (I. 
 519):- 
 
 " The open acts of tyranny and oppression of 
 the chiefs of police, municipality, and such other 
 authorities in power, that are also of daily occurrence, 
 are alone sufficient to goad any people into revolt." 
 
 About the same time, October 6th, Consul San- 
 derson reports on the raids of the Circassians in the 
 Dobrutscha. I will not dwell on the details of 
 plunder and maltreatment : but it is well to notice 
 that when these ruffians came up to serve as troops 
 
 * The local name for Mahometan Bulgarians. 
 
 E
 
 50 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 to Toultcha, by the order of the Governor, " many 
 of the inhabitants buried their goods." This is one 
 of the minor facts, perhaps more instructive in 
 respect to the daily and habitual life of the subject 
 races in Turkey, than any number of details con- 
 cerning actual crime. 
 
 On the 5th of October, writing from Philippopolis, 
 Mr. Baring repeats his statement ''that no improve- 
 ment had taken place in the condition of the Bul- 
 garians" (I. 521), and supports it by some cases. 
 The murder of a Christian at Streldja by two fellow- 
 villagers; the women there unable to repair to the 
 field, as the Turks violate them ; a man sent to the 
 place to work at harvest, but the Turks attempt to 
 violate him as well as his mother, and they fly. A 
 theft happening at Bellova, two Bulgarians are 
 seized ; and then two more, who are beaten until 
 they consent to give evidence against the first two. 
 A Bulgarian girl is beaten by a Mussulman gipsy, for 
 refusing to do forced labour for him. Christians 
 demanding the restitution of stolen goods, are 
 threatened for it by the depredators who hold them. 
 "Wounded Bulgarians are seen in three cases by 
 Mr. Baring himself: but in the last of these, wonder- 
 ful to say, and probably owing to his presence, the 
 malefactors had been arrested. Such are a set of 
 instances, wound up with a declaration that " nothing 
 can possibly be worse than the condition of the 
 Christians in this part of Turkey" on the 5th of
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 51 
 
 October; when the Porte had already had four 
 months to repent of and redress the villainies, which, 
 instead, it protected and rewarded. 
 
 One day later, Mr. Calvert writes from the same 
 place (I. 525) : 
 
 " As regards the general condition of the Christian 
 peasantry, I regret to say that it is as deplorable as 
 ever. One well-authenticated incident will give an 
 idea of the universal mariner in which the Mussul- 
 mans are armed. A Pomak child, receiving the 
 other day some real or imaginary offence from a 
 Christian woman in a village near Peshtera, drew 
 a pistol, and fired point blank at the woman, 
 wounding her severely in the belly." 
 
 She lay at Philippopolis " in a precarious state." 
 For the boy (of 8 or 10 years) the law provided no 
 punishment. For the last four months, at Hasskevi, 
 the Christian inhabitants had been forced to work 
 without pay for the Turks. 
 
 In the Kalofer case, the ' Courier d'Orient ' was 
 suppressed for criticising the declaration by Lord 
 Beaconsfield of the falsity of the story that forty 
 girls had been burned there. It was false. In 
 every case of terror such as this, however large the 
 truth may be, it is sure to be exaggerated here and 
 there by fable. But in that very place the villagers 
 who contradicted the story, said " that many women 
 had been ravished, often in the presence of their 
 relations" (I. 161); a favourite practice, as the 
 
 E 2
 
 52 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 Papers prove, with the Turks. Many women were 
 also killed (I. 14). 
 
 At length, on the 12th of November, Mr. Baring 
 reports " a change for the better in the state of 
 public security." But again on the 4th of December, 
 he regrets to have learned " several cases of robbery 
 and violence," and a regular raid, made upon Avrat- 
 Alan by a number of Turks. There were troops in 
 the place, and the robbers fled : but " no arrests 
 were made " (II. 60, 61). 
 
 On the llth of December (II. 78) he reports two 
 deaths "under suspicious circumstances," at Perous- 
 titza, which he fears will make it more than ever 
 difficult to obtain evidence against any Turk. A 
 Bulgarian peasant has been found murdered on the 
 road to Bazardjik. A policeman (zaptieh) steals the 
 cat of an old man ; perhaps the only living thing, 
 which was now left him in the world to love. When 
 the old man came to reclaim it, the zaptieh cut him 
 down, and gave him a severe wound in the wrist. 
 He went to Bazardjik to complain ; but the brother 
 policemen, with a fine feeling of loyalty to their 
 comrade, drove him off. The zaptieh, thus under 
 Mr. Baring's eyes, was captured ; but (p. 79) he 
 escaped. News came, Dec. 15, that he was recaptured. 
 And we hear no more. It is the old story. Every- 
 where the insolence of old domination breaks out in 
 crime ; committed, in a large share of instances, by 
 the professed ministers of the law. If the agent of
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 53 
 
 a foreign Government be near, if he chance to hear 
 of it, if he be humane, intelligent, active, bold, and 
 persevering, then the Porte is compelled for the 
 moment to mask its habitual purpose of shielding 
 and rewarding outrage in a case like this, and to 
 take some lazy measure towards a trial, in the 
 nature of a first step which need not be followed up. 
 So it is under the happy combination of all these 
 ifs, which does not always happen. It did happen 
 in the case of Mr. Baring. But how was it pos- 
 sible, even for him and I think that the Queen has 
 never had a braver or a better servant to follow 
 up continuously every case, to track the Porte and 
 its agents through all its shiftings and escapes, to 
 inspire, into what was for every purpose of good no 
 better than a corpse, the hearty pulse of justice ? 
 
 On the 30th of November (II. 33) Mr. Calvert 
 reported that owing to the presence of soldiers, at 
 last obtained, and to the punishment of some recent 
 outrages, a gradual yet continuous improvement was 
 observable. The country was now full of relief- 
 agents, every one of whom would be a centre of 
 protective influence ; and it would have been some- 
 what difficult to keep the troops out of Philippopolis 
 at a time when it had become necessary to mass 
 them in the Peninsula of the Balkans on account of 
 the threatening attitude of the Russian forces. 
 
 But on the 19th of December, Mr. Baring is again 
 found entreating protection for the village of Petruch
 
 54 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 from those who were its legal, and should have been 
 its zealous protectors. Here, he says, near the Yilayet 
 of Sofia, the Turks show a most lawless spirit, and 
 commit continual robberies (II. 178). 
 
 Again going northwards, we find from Mr. Reade 
 on the 30th of December that through the Yilayet of 
 the Danube the Christians are in great and general 
 alarm; that, while he was there, robberies and 
 violences were committed by other Mussulmans, as 
 well as by Circassians; that Fandoukly Sultan, a 
 notorious and wholesale offender during the mas- 
 sacres, had been all this time at large, until, under 
 pressure from him, bail was exacted; that the vil- 
 lages enjoying security only obtained it by paying 
 Circassians for immunity, at the rate of 3000 to 
 4000 piastres a year (II. 208). 
 
 Here closes the sickening series of official reports. 
 These outrages were thus constantly committed, with 
 abundant shelter from a Government which towards 
 outrage at least was truly paternal, upon a people 
 most of whom had no concern whatever in the 
 rising ; and at a time, when the rest were subdued, 
 and even grovelling, under abject terror, and under 
 the memory, mingled with the anticipation, of abomi- 
 nations hard to believe, and in some cases far too 
 foul to name. 
 
 Happily we have the promise of a further report 
 from Consul Schuyler upon this subject. In the 
 meantime, for the months of January and February,
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACUK. 55 
 
 I refer to the petition of Bulgarian Notables, dated 
 Feb. 3, in the * Daily News ' of March 3 ; to a peti- 
 tion, which has been presented from the villages in 
 the district of Tatar Bazardjik to the Representatives 
 of the Six Powers, and of which I possess a copy ; 
 finally to the declaration of a Bulgarian, whom Mr. 
 Jasper Moore, an English gentleman well known in 
 political life, attests to me as among the very best 
 authorities in the country. I subjoin his description, 
 dated Feb. 26, 1877, from Philippopolis. 
 
 " The Juggernaut of Turkish extortion is abroad ; 
 a debased paper currency, forced labour for transport- 
 ing military stores, or for working at military works, 
 a second compulsory war contribution, squeeze the 
 
 very life-blood out of our people Murders, 
 
 outrages, and robberies by Mussulmans on Christians 
 are occurring almost daily. Why should they not ? 
 Midhat's Constitution was made for the Europeans, 
 and not for the people of this country ? " 
 
 Such is the continuing condition of Bulgaria. One 
 outrage perhaps in a hundred repressed or noticed, and 
 that always under representation or influence from the 
 agents of foreign Powers ; who do not perceive o'' 
 appreciate the normal utility of these outrages in 
 producing the submissiveness, which is regarded as 
 the only secure basis for the Turkish domination. 
 
 XII. The presence of a military force in Bulgaria 
 has been but a bad security against outrage. But it 
 was the only one ; since the presence of Bashi 
 Bazouks, or the free action of the Mussulman Pomaks,
 
 56 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 was invariably a security not against outrage, but for 
 it. The regulars were heavily implicated, on various 
 occasions, in the crimes of the suppression.* Some- 
 thing of even their character may be inferred from 
 the Blue Books of last year. I quote the case, 
 because I stated it with full detail in Parliament on 
 July 31, 1876, and no contradiction has been or could 
 be given. A party of twelve refugees came back 
 from Dalmatia to Herzegovina, on the invitation of 
 the Porte, under the escort of a party of regulars. 
 The refugees were attacked, and massacred to a man, 
 by some local Mahometans : the appointed guardians 
 stood by and looked -on (Papers of 1876, I. 49). 
 However, there was a chance that they might do 
 their duty in Bulgaria, on which the eyes of all 
 Europe were now set. Without them, the ordinary 
 routine of plunder, murder, rape, and bestiality, was 
 certain. Without them, also, says Mr. Sandison, it 
 was not easy to say (I. 372) how far the Commission 
 would or even could do its duty. 
 
 * See, for example, Mr. Baring's Eeport, I. 157. After a 
 recital of horrors (suck as the violation, followed by the murder, of 
 a girl of fourteen, in the presence of her mother), he says, " The case 
 is not improved by the fact that these deeds were committed not 
 only by Bashi Bazouks, but also by regulars ; the Arab soldiers 
 in particular, distinguishing themselves by their licentiousness 
 and ferocity." Again. " I am told," says Mr. Marsh (I. 986), 
 " that the soldiers in Sliven number 600. . . But I myself have 
 seen and experienced their lawlessness. The city would be 
 safer without them ! " Also see Mr. Schuyler on Novo Ma- 
 halleh and Peroustitza.
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 57 
 
 On the 26th of September, nearly five months after 
 the Massacres began, Mr. Baring reports, from the 
 central point of Philippopolis, as follows (I. 431) : 
 
 "No troops have been sent here from Constan- 
 tinople ; the 3000 men who left last week, and some 
 of whom were said to be destined to garrison this 
 town, went on to the seat of war." 
 
 This passage opens up another of the dark laby- 
 rinths of iniquity and falsehood, into which we must 
 now descend. 
 
 The practice of the Turks and their devotees, since 
 the Massacres, has been persistently to ascribe 
 " what occurred " to the want of regulars. On their 
 own showing, then, it was the first duty of the 
 Porte to supply this want. It would be ridiculous 
 to contend that this Empire of forty millions, ready 
 as it is stated to face the eighty millions of the 
 Czar, or even all Europe, in arms, could not supply 
 3000 or 4000 men for Bulgaria, because it had to 
 conduct military operations against populations 
 numbering say two millions, who were aided in 
 Serbia by three or four thousand Russian volunteers. 
 From May to July 1, however, even such a war did 
 not exist. 
 
 We find, notwithstanding, that Bulgaria remains 
 denuded of military, to such an extent that Acting 
 Vice-Consul Calvert has to move the Porte through 
 Sir H. Elliot, by telegraph from Philippopolis. on two 
 successive days, to provide for the peace of one of its
 
 58 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 own provinces lying next its capital. On the 16th 
 of September he announces that threats are freely 
 used by the Mussulmans, that isolated outrages are 
 frequent, and " can only be stopped by considerable 
 reinforcements of troops and police to disarm Turks." 
 On the 17th, we are told the local Governor had 
 already applied to Constantinople, but without result. 
 " Bloodshed on a small scale possible, unless more 
 troops sent at once" (I. 373). The Governor had 
 made a second application. All in vain ! 
 
 On the 19th, Sir H. Elliot sent his Dragoman to 
 represent the case. With the two applications of 
 his own Governor in his pocket, the Grand Vizir 
 impudently replied, " that the news received by the 
 Sublime Porte were satisfactory, and that nothing 
 necessitated the Government sending troops in the 
 direction of Philippopolis." 
 
 This, it may be said, was the Grand Yizir, not 
 the impeccable Midhat. But unfortunately the next 
 words of the Dragoman are, "Midhat Pacha has 
 confirmed the words of the Grand Yizir " (I. 374). 
 
 It seems, however, to have been felt that this 
 portion of the miserable farce had been rather over- 
 acted ; and Sir H. Elliot writes on the 20th (I. 373), 
 " I have since been told that a considerable number 
 of troops have been sent to the district in question." 
 Join on to this Mr. Baring's report of the 26th ; 
 and the picture is complete, as to the particular 
 transaction.
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 59 
 
 But the particular transaction must also be joined 
 on to the original proceedings of the Turk. At the 
 outset of the rising " the provincial authorities sent 
 urgent appeals to Constantinople for troops ; " but 
 the Grand Vizir did not send them (I. 164). 
 
 Mr. Baring insinuates that he listened to the evil 
 counsels of Russia. But where, in this great emer- 
 gency, were the good counsels, and the boasted in- 
 fluence, of England? If it be true that Russian 
 agents recommended that the Massacre should be 
 allowed, it is all the more expedient that we should 
 keep out Russian ascendancy by now at length 
 showing the Slavs that they have something else to 
 lean on ; but no counsel of Russian agents can in the 
 least degree diminish, though it might cumulate, the 
 abominable guilt. 
 
 Why were not the Bashi Bazouks recalled when 
 their horrible proceedings had become known ? Sir 
 H. Elliot incessantly pressed it. (Papers, I. 9.) 
 
 On May 23, 1876, Mr. Sandison, by the order of 
 the Ambassador, strongly remonstrated against the 
 employment of the Bashi Bazouks in Bulgaria, peace 
 still prevailing ; but the Grand Vizir replied that 
 he had referred the matter to Abdul Kerim, the 
 Commander-in-Chief ; to that Abdul Kerim, whose 
 written order to kill, burn, and destroy, we are told 
 that Shefket Pacha carries, as the amulet of his safety. 
 (Papers of 1876, III. 214.) 
 
 On the 8th of June (Papers of 1876, III. 267),
 
 60 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 the Ambassador was assured that the irregulars had 
 been recalled. But on a later day of the same month, 
 the Porte expressly refused to withdraw them : and 
 we now further know that at a later date a fresh 
 levy of them, and also of Circassians, was made. 
 (Papers of 1877, I. 12.) 
 
 On the 5th of October Mr. Reade reports, that for 
 want of police and military, " the public security is 
 very unsatisfactory," both in the Dobrutcha, and 
 almost throughout the Vilayet of the Danube 
 (I. 518). 
 
 This relates to Bulgaria north of the Balkans : 
 
 o 
 
 we have already accounted for the country to the 
 south. 
 
 XIII. Among the many recitals of the defensive 
 or apologetic language, by which the Porte was 
 obliged to conceal its real sentiments respecting the 
 Massacres, there is not to be found one single expres- 
 sion of condemnation, nay, not even of regret, for the 
 utter ruin, and ineffable sufferings, of so many Bul- 
 garians. It appears that no pressure of words from 
 England, no dread of acts from Russia, has been 
 able to draw from the Porte one syllable against 
 the Massacres. From a certain point of view, this 
 is even creditable. 
 
 The favourite method is to describe the Bulgarian 
 outrages as " recent events " (II. 50), " occurrences " 
 (I. 316), "what has occurred" (I. 750). But some- 
 times there seems to arise a vision of diminished
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 61 
 
 receipt from Bulgaria ; and we hear of the " troubles" 
 (II. 319), "losses" (II. 225), "grievous sacrifices" 
 (II. 24). The nearest approach to decency that 
 is found practicable is in the phrase " unhappy 
 business " (I. 61), used by Safvet Pacha on the 10th 
 of August, and " sad episode " on December 23rd, 
 (II. 225). Turkey sought too, " to heal the wounds 
 of the civil war," by the means faintly imaged in 
 these pages. The true spirit comes out in the speech 
 of Ali Effendi, delivered for the Government in the 
 trial of Alish Pehlivau, on the 20th of December, as 
 it is reported by Mr. Baring. " Had it not been for 
 the gallant efforts of those public benefactors, the 
 Bashi Bazouks, the Empire would have been placed 
 in great jeopardy " (II. 179). And this is borne out 
 by the judgment of Mr. Baring in another dispatch 
 (I. 432). 
 
 "The vast majority of the Mussulman population 
 look upon the perpetrators of the horrors not as 
 criminals, but as heroes, who, for their praiseworthy 
 efforts to extirpate a noxious race, have deserved 
 well of their country. 
 
 XIV. I have not discovered in a single document 
 proceeding from the Porte an admission that any 
 excesses had been committed by the Mahometans in 
 Bulgaria. When Sir Henry Elliot says he had 
 received promises (e.g. I. 419), that the "guilty" 
 should be punished, he does not profess to be 
 quoting official language. In the view of the Porte,
 
 62 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 and in the declarations of the Porte, there are nowhere 
 any guilty, except Bulgarian Christians. 
 
 Two methods of proceeding, however, seem to have 
 been pursued. In communicating with the British 
 Ambassador, it would have been perilous to say out- 
 right there was no outrage, no atrocity, in the exe- 
 cution of the Vengeance. The indirect method is 
 therefore adopted. On June 19, 1876, the Grand 
 Vizir (Papers of 1876, III. 344) dwelt upon the 
 exaggerations, which were but here and there ; on 
 the atrocities of the Christians, which cannot be 
 said to have existed in the sense in which the Turks 
 flooded Bulgaria with atrocities ; of the foreign 
 agents, respecting whom Mr. Baring spoke in his 
 first Report, but explained in a later Paper that they 
 were not foreign at all, but were expatriated 
 natives of Bulgaria. Again, Safvet Pacha com- 
 plained bitterly that the deeds of the Turks were 
 exaggerated by the newspapers : and this at a time 
 when British official agents had hazarded the as- 
 tounding statement that it was uncertain on which 
 side the greatest amount of crime had been com- 
 mitted ! 
 
 But for the outer world, a different and bolder 
 course was adopted. I refer again to the Order of 
 Blacque Bey, in which he speaks, on the 8th of 
 August, of the pretended excesses committed^ in 
 Bulgaria, and recites as part of the ground for 
 suppressing a newspaper, that it had ascribed, to
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 63 
 
 itself a sort of merit in having been the first to 
 expose those imaginary crimes (supposes). 
 
 So on the 5th of October (I. 524) Toussoun Bey 
 stoutly maintained " that there had been no massacre 
 at Dervent." This worthy's performances at the 
 place are thus recorded by Mr. Baring (I. 523) : 
 
 Men slain at Dervent 58 
 
 Women and children 192 
 
 Infants 30 
 
 And surely, in addition to his other decorations, 
 still enjoyed, he deserves the title of "the Infant- 
 Slaughterer." 
 
 But it is not necessary to multiply the denials of 
 inferior authorities in detail ; for we proceed next 
 to the highest of all authorities. It is however 
 well to mention that, in close parallelism with the 
 denials and evasions, ran the careful suppression of 
 intelligence. 
 
 On one occasion the Porte had put into action a 
 perilous machinery. After the scandalous affair of 
 Edib Effendi, it sent two Christian Commissioners 
 of its own to Philippopolis ; and moreover it in- 
 structed them to tell the truth. It appears that they 
 tried to do so. With regard to " the principal scenes 
 of slaughter " their report did not " differ materially 
 from that of Mr. Baring/' except as to numbers 
 slain ; and they denounced the conduct of those who 
 executed the Vengeance in the severest terms. At
 
 64 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 Batak they set forth that the villagers had given up 
 their arms hefore they were assailed ; and that " men, 
 women, and children were ruthlessly slaughtered by 
 the Bashi Bazouks, led by Achmet Agha, his son, 
 and his son-in-law" (I. 418, 419). 
 
 But this report has been kept back by the Turkish 
 Government ; and it was not from them, but by some 
 other means, that Sir H. Elliot obtained an acquaint- 
 ance with its contents '(ibid.). 
 
 XV. On the llth of January, 1877 (II. 190), Lord 
 Salisbury sends home a list of proposals to which as 
 an irreducible minimum the Eussian representative, 
 and to which also the other representatives, had 
 agreed. Among these is named 
 
 " General amnesty to Christians condemned for 
 political reasons." 
 
 In II. p. 274, Midhat is represented by Sir H. 
 Elliot as having declined the proposal. 
 
 In p. 302, Lord Salisbury mentions on the 12th 
 of January, a concession proposed by Midhat. He 
 offered "to grant an amnesty to Mussulmans and 
 Christians." This amnesty would, as Lord Salisbury 
 proceeds to observe, have included Shefket Pacha 
 and Achmet Aga. 
 
 XVI. "We may now proceed to consider the authen- 
 tic Ottoman account of the Bulgarian Massacres. It 
 was delivered by Safvet Pacha, in the assembled Con- 
 ference, on the 23rd of December. We shall find that 
 it did not stop short, of eulogy. Assuredly of blame
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. *& 
 
 it does not contain a word, except for the " revolu- 
 tionary party," and the Bulgarian people. 
 
 The revolt broke out, said Safvet Pacha, "in a 
 country as quiet as it was prosperous : " of which 
 the moral wants had been the object of a special 
 solicitude, so that the Porte was even accused of an 
 undue partiality for the Bulgarians (II. 225). 
 
 No attempt is made to sustain by evidence this 
 string of gross untruths. It was perhaps hoped that 
 we should have mistaken the schools, which the 
 energy of the people had built for themselves at 
 their own cost, or which in some cases missionary 
 activity had supplied, for a sign of the moral solici- 
 tude of the Turk. 
 
 These ungrateful Bulgarians, he continues, de- 
 luded by the strangers, rose against their benefactor, 
 and massacred, pillaged, and burnt out the Mussul- 
 mans. But the movement was repressed, " without 
 that effusion of blood which was pretended." .... 
 Quite on the contrary . . . . " one would be astonished 
 that an insurrection, which had for its object the 
 conversion of all the Peninsula of the Balkans into a 
 vast field of slaughter, could have been suppressed 
 and completely annihilated, in BO short a time, and 
 without having had more losses to complain of." 
 
 Such is the estimate formed by the official Turk of 
 orgies, which hell itself might have envied. But 
 he is not yet content. In tbe face of Europe, he pro- 
 nounces a deliberate eulogy upon bis crimes (II. 227). 
 
 E
 
 66 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 " Turkey can say that it is her firmness and mo- 
 deration which have overpowered that great revolu- 
 tionary conspiracy, which openly aimed at the over- 
 throw of the Ottoman Empire, and at profoundly 
 disturbing the peace of Europe." 
 
 And for this, and the whole of its services (ibid.), 
 " The Ottoman Government believes it has acquired 
 new claims to the sympathetic interest of the Great 
 Powers." 
 
 These declarations entirely support my view. From 
 first to last the Porte has been consistent. Com- 
 pelled at times for a moment to dissemble, it has re- 
 turned, upon the earliest opportunity, to its point of 
 view. The bloodshed in Bulgaria was small not 
 great, the whole proceedings good not bad. How, 
 if this fails, is it possible for us to be undeceived 
 as to the character, in its internal government, of an 
 ally with whom the British Ambassador hopes to see 
 us drawn into yet closer ties of sympathy and friend- 
 ship (I. 425) ? 
 
 XVII. The inquiry, originally wrung from the 
 Porte, has been proved, by its history and upshot, to 
 be a fictitious and pretended inquiry, a mockery and 
 a prostitution of justice. 
 
 I might lengthen this pamphlet by setting out in 
 detail the series of complaints by the Ambassador, 
 the Consuls, the Foreign Secretary, Mr. Baring, 
 respecting the delays, the evasions, the partiality, of 
 the Commission, its evident determination to do as
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 67 
 
 little as possible, and to do nothing that was effec- 
 tive, or (which is the same thing) that could bring 
 it into collision with the inflamed and savage 
 temper of the Mahometan population of Bulgaria. 
 
 As respects Lord Derby, it may be enough to say 
 that on the 24th of November (II. 14) he addressed 
 to the Porte through Lord Salisbury a most severe 
 condemnation of the Commission; and that this 
 condemnation was cited by the Government on the 
 12th of February, 1877, in the House of Commons, 
 a fact showing that we must consider it as still in 
 full force. 
 
 Lord Derby contrasts the laxity shown in bringing 
 the Mussulmans to justice with "the activity dis- 
 played by the Porte in punishing the Christians ;" 
 and says of the Commission, the amended and final 
 Commission (ibid.) : 
 
 " The conduct of the Commission has also been in 
 many other respects most unsatisfactory : the few 
 members of it, who have shown any capacity for 
 judicial investigation, have been checked and hin- 
 dered by the interruptions of their colleagues ; and, 
 months after the massacre of hundreds of women 
 and children, and of unarmed men, the Commis- 
 sioners are still considering whether such murders 
 are crimes." 
 
 Down to this date the Turkish Government had 
 only supplied a sum of 7000/. for the restoration of 
 the village. Nothing done to restore the industries. 
 It was doubtful how many of the kidnapped women 
 
 F 2
 
 68 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 had been brought back. No examples on the spot. 
 The trials far from the scene of the outrages. 
 " The proceedings have thus been delayed, the effect 
 of example lost, and the ends of justice to a great 
 extent frustrated " (ibid.). 
 
 While Lord Derby described as above the conduct 
 of the Commission, the Porte, at very nearly the 
 same date, on the 22nd of November, assured the 
 world (I. 751) that its progress was "most satis- 
 factory ;" that the character of its members " offered 
 every guarantee " for justice ; that " it was doing 
 its work so speedily, that nothing further could be 
 desired." 
 
 Until after the severe despatch of Lord Derby, 
 dated September 21, we now hear from Mr. Baring 
 (September 27, I. 432) that "not one of those who 
 committed the atrocities had been put into confine- 
 ment." 
 
 What, then, is the upshot, as far as at this date we 
 know it ? 
 
 It is important to bear in mind that after the 
 murder of the Consuls at Salonica by a fanatical 
 populace, not acting under the orders or according 
 to the mind of the Government, the Porte made no 
 difficulty about hanging at once six, and condemning 
 to death six more, of the offenders. The extraordi- 
 nary contrast between this proceeding and the 
 course followed in the Bulgarian case, cannot pos- 
 sibly have been without a cause. The Porte does 
 not desire the murder of Consuls. The Salonica mob
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 69 
 
 had not understood the Government; the offenders 
 in Bulgaria had understood it, and fulfilled its will. 
 
 On the 12th of February, the Under-Secretary of 
 State for Foreign Affairs gave the following account 
 of the sentences pronounced in Bulgaria for excesses 
 in the execution of the Vengeance. 
 
 Two condemned to death : Achmet Aga, and an 
 insignificant person, Melto Behtash. 
 
 One to hard labour for life. 
 
 Three to hard labour for terms. 
 
 Two to short imprisonments. 
 
 Two functionaries recalled. 
 
 Of the execution of these sentences, Mr. Bourke 
 had nothing to say. They were sentences only. 
 They were ten in number. In .the case of the two 
 Consuls at Salonica, where the Turkish mob really 
 had some sort of excuse, they were twenty-seven. 
 (Papers of 1876, IV. 56.) 
 
 I am not sure that this answer did full justice to 
 the Turk. We hear from Mr. Brophy on July 22 
 (I. 13), that a Bashi Bazouk was stated to have been 
 hung, it did not appear for what crime. Some- 
 where else the death of another obscure malefactor 
 is reported. If we add these two to the list it stands, 
 as follows: 
 
 For the murder F r * he murder f 15 ' 000 
 
 Bulgarians, and very 
 of two Consul*. 
 
 Hung ......... 6 ......... 2 
 
 Sentenced, not hung 6 ......... 2 
 
 Other sentences ... 15 ......... 8
 
 70 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 III. 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 Our results on the whole may be summed up as 
 follows : 
 
 The Porte at first intended no inquiry at all into 
 the repression, but energetically followed up the 
 Massacres with further and rather sweeping ven- 
 geance. 
 
 It did not trust to avowed vengeance only; but 
 prolonged the reign of terror and suffering in 
 Bulgaria by advisedly withholding military guar- 
 dianship. 
 
 To make its teaching yet more intelligible, it 
 rewarded the most prominent cases of cruelty, and 
 other yet worse outrage, by decorations, commands, 
 and offices, as exhibitions of virtuous and patriotic 
 energy ; and it excluded from reward, or even 
 visited with the punishment of dismissal, the cases, 
 not a few, of courageous humanity among the Mus- 
 sulmans, as exhibitions of a spirit unfaithful to the 
 domination of Islam. 
 
 So far its action was perfectly spontaneous, as 
 well as consistent; and it was singularly favoured 
 by the extraordinary reticence, which kept back from 
 the people of England the officially-attested know- 
 ledge of the Massacres, until in the month of August,
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 71 
 
 three months after they had occurred, it began to 
 ooze out. 
 
 Then arose the indignation of this country ; it 
 resounded in every other ; and in a sudden manner, 
 and probably with surprise, the Porte, which had 
 been exulting in the success of its great achieve- 
 ment, found itself charged, in the hearing of all 
 Europe, with having committed through its agents 
 a portentous mass of crimes. 
 
 When the first mutterings had previously reached 
 it, Commissioners were sent out, and official papers 
 contrived, and circulated in Europe, which by omis- 
 sion, and by positive falsehood, wholly put aside the 
 charges. This measure was carefully backed by the 
 suppression of a newspaper for daring to support 
 them ;- and false confessions were extorted from the 
 terrified population, to assure the world that they 
 were unfounded. 
 
 After other shifts, as the Indignation " did not 
 pass but grew," a Commission was appointed to pro- 
 ceed judicially. Men known to be bad were placed 
 upon it to mar the action of their more honourable 
 colleagues. The support of adequate force, which 
 it required in order to withstand the exasperated 
 pride of the Mahometan population, was withheld. 
 Evasions and delays of every kind were practised ; 
 the Christians charged, and sometimes the Christian 
 counsel who defended them, exhibited the most 
 abject terror. The bad men of the Commission 
 bullied and domineered from the bench. The sen-
 
 72 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 tences have been few, slowly extorted under inces- 
 sant diplomatic pressure, with the threat of Russian 
 arms, and with the presence and incessant vigilance 
 of foreign agents, especially of Mr. Baring. They 
 have also been illusory, for as to those of confine- 
 ment with or without hard labour, we have no 
 means of knowing whether it has ever been in- 
 flicted, or whether if begun it will be continued. The 
 only real, that is the only irrevocable sentence has 
 been that of death, pronounced after some months of 
 delay on one or two persons ; in December, on a 
 Pomak who had previously been rewarded for his 
 crimes : and this sentence has not yet, in March, 
 been executed. Even were the Turks to alter now 
 the character of their proceedings, it is far too late. 
 We have before us, "with ample verge and room 
 enough," the true character, first of their spontaneous 
 view and action on the Massacres; secondly, of 
 the niggardly amount of make-believe inquiry and 
 retribution, which gratitude for favours too many and 
 too recent, which the fear of estranging friendly 
 sympathy too long maintained, which humanity, 
 which reason, which policy, which anything short of 
 coercion could wring out of a State, of which the 
 heart is on this subject harder than the nether 
 millstone. 
 
 " Duris genuit t6 cautibus horrens 
 Caucasus, Hyrcanaeque admorunt ubera tigres."* 
 
 Virgil, ^n. IV. 366.
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 73 
 
 It had become too late, for a long time too late, 
 by any spasmodic change of proceedings to abate the 
 force of the evidence here inadequately sketched, when 
 on Friday, the 1st of March, the Under-Secretary of 
 State was asked whether it was true that Toussoun 
 Bey, the Infant-slaughterer, an offender second only 
 to Shef ket Pacha, with his batch of coadjutors, had 
 been acquitted, and whether Mr. Baring had taken 
 away the sanction of his presence from the Court 
 which had performed this shameless mockery of 
 justice ? The answer was, that Toussoun and his 
 accomplices had been absolved ; that Mr. Baring had 
 departed ; and that no more trials would take place. 
 
 This is not a treatise on the subject of the East at 
 large. But the Bulgarian outrages, though they are 
 not the Eastern Question, are a key to the Eastern 
 Question. They exhibit the true genius of the Turkish 
 Government. Externally an isolated though porten- 
 tous fact, they unlock to us an entire mystery of ini- 
 quity. Vast as is their intrinsic importance, they are 
 yet more important for what they indicate, than for 
 what they are. The heaviest question of all is not 
 what was suffered in a given district at a given date, 
 but what is the normal and habitual condition of 
 eight or ten millions of the subject races, who for 
 fifteen generations of men have been in servitude to 
 the Turk. This is, I may say, the question of ques- 
 tions. And of this we can best judge by observing 
 what is the conduct of the Government and its
 
 <* LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 agents upon a great and palmary occasion, when, 
 for once, it is brought fully into view. Let us 
 see, then, what light has just been cast upon it. 
 With the outrages the Porte now stands unalter- 
 ably identified ; and a Government so identified 
 is not merely weak, or impotent, or passionate, or 
 cruel in this or that particular : it is a Government 
 which reverses the great canon of right and wrong ; 
 and which, in the holding down of the subject races, 
 adopts the motto given by Milton * to his Satan 
 
 " Evil, be thou my good." 
 
 Not, indeed, that this inverted law is for the Porte 
 an unvarying rule of action. There is no such 
 thing in the world. Man is never consistent, in 
 evil or in good. Hope, fear, interest, shame, a 
 better nature breaking into light upon occasion, may 
 produce, in its commonplace and secondary action, 
 much that is less evil, and even some very few 
 things that are good. But as in individual life, so 
 in the life of Governments, it is the great crisis that 
 searches nature to its depths, and brings out the 
 true spirit of the man. The Bulgarian rising was a 
 great crisis. A people of five millions, the most 
 docile, patient, and submissive in all Europe, had 
 dared to commence a revolt. It was as if the sheep 
 were to attack the butcher, and fill him for a 
 moment with alarm. Much violence, some cruelty, 
 
 * 'Paradise Lost,' iv. 110.
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 75 
 
 might in those circumstances well be understood. 
 Habitual brutality, exasperated by fear, so far from 
 remembering in the hour of wrath the long endur- 
 ance of a suffering race, determined that in propor- 
 tion to their effeminacy in bearing should be their 
 deep descent into the pit of suffering. Bulgaria had 
 on the whole theretofore exhibited the most splendid 
 example of successful Turkism, in its perfect submis- 
 sion to terror ; in the seeming extinction even of the 
 wish to murmur; lastly, in the copious revenues 
 yielded by its dogged industry. Alfieri boasted of 
 the Italians, long years before their resurrection to 
 a nation's life 
 
 " Siam eervi si ; ma servi ognor frementi." 
 
 In Bulgaria generally, even the last sigh had 
 been stifled ; it seemed not even to fret for freedom. 
 And it is no wonder if to those who had spoiled 
 this magnificent success, this great work of art, there 
 was due, on the principles of Turkism, under the 
 impulses of the wild beast that dwells in human 
 nature, an exemplary vengeance. This is not new. 
 The wars of the Serbian and of the Greek Eevo- 
 lutions* supplied apparent parallels to the great 
 Bulgarian Vengeance. But Christendom had not 
 then the open channels, which happily it now pos- 
 sesses, for tolerably full communication of the facts ; 
 
 * See e.g. the admirable paper of Mr. Godkin on the Eastern 
 Question in the 'North American Review ' for January, 1877.
 
 76 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 and though we may believe, we are not judicially 
 entitled to assert, that the Turkish Government had 
 at those junctures, as it has had now, the wretched 
 perpetrators of the acts for the mere tools of its 
 master-spirit, working from the centre at Constan- 
 tinople for the misery of man. 
 
 This, I say again, is upon the whole the great 
 anti-human specimen of humanity. To exorcise it 
 will be easy, when the exorcisers are agreed ; diffi- 
 cult only as long as some remain wrapped in con- 
 tented ignorance, others case-hardened in political 
 selfishness, and some even possessed, as the British 
 Ambassador has been possessed, with the belief that 
 the condition of the subject races of Turkey ought 
 to be supremely determined by whatever our estimate 
 of British interests may require.* A little faith in 
 the ineradicable difference between right and wrong 
 is worth a great deal of European diplomacy, bewil- 
 dered by views it dare neither dismiss nor avow. In 
 this state of things, and even with the great example 
 of Mr. Canning in the case of Greece before us, it 
 was natural to hope, as long as hope was not irra- 
 tional, that the disease of Turkey was curable ; that 
 
 * " We may and must feel indignant at the needless and mon- 
 strous severity with which the Bulgarian insurrection was put 
 down ; but the necessity which exists for England to prevent 
 changes from occurring here, which would be most detrimental 
 to ourselves, is not affected by the question whether it was 
 10,000 or 20,000 persons who perished in the suppression."' 
 Sir H. Elliot to the Earl of Derby, Sept. 4, 1876. Papers I. 197.
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 77 
 
 the mild and gentle tone, which the spirit of our 
 Century has infused into so many Governments, 
 might find access even to the hard heart of the 
 Porte. But this hope only could be rational, only 
 could be even excusable, so long as it remained 
 ready to own the truth, to conform itself to the 
 teaching of experience. This teaching we have now, 
 to our sorrow, perhaps even to our shame, obtained. 
 Neither weakness, nor accident, nor ignorance, 
 nor an occasional fit of fury, nor the unfaithfulness 
 of agents to their principal, lies at the root of the 
 Bulgarian Massacres. They are the true expression 
 of the spirit and policy of the Turkish Government 
 in seasons of emergency ; when, passing from the 
 indifference and contempt with which it commonly 
 regards every function of civil government, except 
 the receipt of money, it dispels the precarious ease 
 for which at times that indifference and contempt 
 leave room, and in the words of Bluntschli, "does 
 not shrink from sanguinary horrors " in support of 
 its " barbarous domination."* 
 
 Again, then, I repeat the accusation. The Turkish 
 Government, which debases its subjects when they 
 submit, and by its agents plunders, violates, and 
 murders them " at its own sweet will " from time to 
 time, has a more developed and consistent method 
 for seasons of crisis. On the occasions when they 
 rise, as in Bulgaria, it exhausts upon them, it must be 
 
 " " Das Recht der Europaischen Intervention in der Tiirkei." 
 In 'Die Gegenwart,' Berlin, December 9, 1876.
 
 78 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 
 
 deliberately said, all the resources of a wickedness 
 more fiendish than human, either by instigation be- 
 forehand, which is not yet proved, or by reward, pro- 
 tection, sanction afterwards, which is proved. After 
 the most solemn and reiterated pledges to endow 
 them with equality of rights, after incessant boast- 
 ings of its own beneficent and paternal spirit, after 
 trampling in the dust all these promises, and 
 confuting all these boasts by its acts a hundred 
 times repeated, it is inexhaustible like Proteus in 
 ever new forms of evasion and escape, available to 
 cozen none except those who are, lazily or perversely, 
 willing to be deceived. Thus it is now going to be 
 regenerated, for the hundredth time ; it has launched, 
 at length, its written Constitution. On this I do not 
 waste a word ; but I simply refer to the straight- 
 forward declaration of Sir Stafford Northcote,* and 
 to the masterly and lacerating exposure of Lord 
 Salisbury.! If ever, in the whole history of human 
 action, a negative was demonstrated by experience, 
 it is the moral impossibility that the Porte either 
 will or can efficaciously transmute by self-reform the 
 relation between itself and its subject races. And 
 are we thus to go on from day to day, and from 
 year to year ? 
 
 " The days will grow to weeks, the weeks to months, 
 The months will add themselves and make the years." 
 
 We palter, we excuse, we set up false lights to draw 
 * ' Times ' of Feb. 9, 1877. . f Papers, II. p. 302.
 
 LESSONS IN MASSACRE. 79 
 
 us off the path ; at last with huge effort we appoint 
 a man, yes, a real man, to speak ; but he is well 
 warned that his big brave words at Constantinople 
 shall be well understood to be words only. What 
 in the meantime is the state of these subject races ? 
 It is this ; that their Government is the incarnate 
 curse of their existence. If the child can laugh, if 
 the maiden can breathe freely, if the mother can 
 tend the house and the father till the field in peace, 
 it is when, and so long as, the agents of this Govern- 
 ment are not in view; and it only proves that 
 tyrannous Power has not yet found the alchymy, by 
 which it can convert human life into one huge mass 
 of misery, uniform and unredeemed. What civilisa- 
 tion longs for, what policy no less than humanity 
 requires, is that united Europe, scouted, as we have 
 seen, in its highest, its united diplomacy, shall pass 
 sentence in its might, upon a Government which 
 unites the vices of the conqueror and the slave, 
 and which is lost alike to truth, to mercy, and to 
 shame. It is not a harsh sentence, but a mild one, 
 that, at least where its guilt is thus fully proved, 
 where the restoration of respect and confidence is 
 hopeless, it shall submit, if not as I should desire to 
 confine its claims to acknowledged dignity and liberal 
 tributes,* yet at the very least to such restraints on 
 
 * I must, once for all, beg leave to assert my strong conviction 
 that the method of a real autonomy, superintended from abroad 
 in the transition-stage, is the method by far the most favourable, 
 among all that have been proposed, to the Porte itself, as well 
 as to its subjects, and to the peace of Europe.
 
 80 LESSONS IN MASSACKE. 
 
 the exercise of administrative power, as all Europe 
 has declared to be indispensable. But above all, let 
 us not cover with the name of compromises the new 
 shifts we may devise to hide the nakedness of our 
 X minds, and the feebleness of our wills. A " respite " 
 1 for Turkey is simply a respite to the criminal, not 
 from punishment, but from prevention ; a solemn 
 licence to continue his misdeeds. " A year of grace " 
 to Turkey is to Turkey's victims only another year 
 of debasement ; of want ; of misery and shame, felt 
 more or less keenly by them just in proportion 
 as they may less or more retain the higher senses 
 and capabilities of humanity. In this free country, 
 every man has his word, and every man his respon- 
 sibility : the action of every man contributes to make 
 up that tide of opinion, which moves the moral world. 
 I ask of England, that we redeem the pledges which 
 we gave to the subject races by the Crimean War, 
 and by the Peace which followed it. Let others if 
 they choose invite the spreading of new snares, and 
 walk into them in open day. With a share of the 
 responsibility of the Crimean War upon me, I 
 respectfully decline to join them : and I have a firm 
 conviction that, when the people of England tell 
 their mind to the world and to the Porte in the 
 choice of their representatives from time to time, the 
 lesson conveyed by their acts, so far as it goes, will 
 be, " You shall not do it again." 
 
 March 10, 1877.
 
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