The Wolverhampton and Midland Counties Advertiser. — 1876-08-19 (Wolverhampton, West Midlands, England)

THE BULGARIAN OUTRAGES.  Even our jaunty Premier must begin to doubt the tender mercies of his Turkish proteges, and believe that they have gone a little too far in Bulgaria, in tossing helpless infants into the air to catch them on the sword-point, in violating and murdering thousands of women, in massacring their husbands, fathers, and brothers, and in burning more than 70 villages. No doubt he is well pleased that awkward questions that must be answered, cannot be put in Parliament for another six months. The chief cause of the insurrection that has taken place in Bulgaria, has been the levying of black mail on the quiet and industrious Christian inhabitants, in the shape of taxes so heavy that the poor people could not pay them. Only in a few villages, however, did disturbances take place, and at no time were there more than one thousand insurgents in arms in Bulgatia. To suppress this rising, that 1,000 of the regular troops of the Empire could in its early stages have put down with little bloodshed, Bashi Bazouks, compared with whom banditti are inoffensive, , were let loose on the defenceless people, and horrors worse than those perpetrated at Ca.wnpore were committed on every hand. From 12,000 to 20,000 people were slain, while the Turks' losses, at their own computation, have been only 200. The town of Batock that had 0,000 inhabitants, has now only 2,000, and ,the district is ruined. Thousands who have returned to the sites of their once peaceful homes, are living in sheds and are dependent upon charity for sustenance. An appeal is being made to England for assistance.' With one hand the British people will nobly give , to aid the destitute and with the other—as a nation—they will give moral support to the amiable Turk. We have been propping up the "Sick Man" for many ;years on ths plea of "British policy." Much wiser, however, would it have been if, a generation ago, we had begun to foster the independence of the Christian populations of European Turkey. Mr. Disraeli may declaim about maintaining the British Empire, and, in all the rhetoric of which he is master, ape a patriotism with which, under present circumstances, few will sympathise, by saying that he will do nothing to endanger that Empire; but even the true and permanent interests of this country would have been better sawed by such a policy as Lord John Russell now recommends. That policy ii the placing of a Christian monarch on the throne at Constantinople:ak govern European Turkey, in which the Christians outnumber the Mahommedans. If this had been impossible, England might wisely have made itself a friend of those Christian nationalities so long crushed down by Mussulman misrule, for there is a thirst for liberty and self-government in them which all the brutalities of the Sublime Porte will not be able to stamp out. England has done all it could to drive those people to look to Russia as their natuial protector and deliverer, while it might have found that strength in the East which it is though desirable to have to prevent the onward march of the Russ, by making itself a friend of the oppreF,sed. Our Prime Minister, however, condemns revolution against Governments, no matter how great the tyranny may be, though he is now the political chief of a nation that has won much of its own freedom by revolution. And since Earl Beaconsfield has succeeded in, his career, though a political paradox, he will by many be thought right in his conclusions, and English history and English sympathy appear at fault.