The Bee-Hive. — 1876-08-12 (London, England)

THE BEE-HIVE.  ERRORS OF TEE PREMIER.  The Prime Minister of England will, it is probable, feel constrained to admit his error in extenuating the Turkish atrocities ill Bulgaria. Mr. Baring, dispatched from the British embassy, is on a tour of inquiry, accompanied, among others, by the gentleMan who, in the Daily News, first brought these devilish doings te the light of day. He anticipates that Mr. Baring will have to report the burning of threescore villages, and the massacre of .twelve thousand human beings. His arrival on the scene of these Iterrors promised liberty to a number who were languishing in Prison. For interpreter he has a man of Italian-like name who '4lllleB the Bulgarians, but is obsequious to the Turks. The aPPearance of a Turkish escort at the side of the English C°llunissioner frightens the surviving peasantry, who shudder more at the sight of Tussan Bey, leader of the Bashi-bazouks, inBPeeting with him the very villages that he ordered to be burned. 114, though the peasantry may be- afraid to speak out in such a Presence, the facts speak for themselves, louder and more horribly than any words. In the first place, what evidence is likely to be forthcoming in Confirmation of Mr. Disraeli's notion that the Turks did but retaliate on the Christians after their own manner. Quoting for authority the name of Kr. Schuyler, American Commissioner, our count-rya:l 11, a as veracious as he is humane, tells us, that any Turks who Were killed fell in fair fight, that not one case of a Turkish woman or a Turkish child being killed has been discovered. There Was but one instance in whirl the Bulgarians attacked the Turks;  namely, in a village of mixed inhabitants; and only in three other instances did the Bulgarian villagers offer any resistance. Among the scenes of fire and slaughter visited by Mr. Baring was the town of Batok, which may be regarded as a sufficient sample of the sickening sights beheld. It had nine thousand living inhabitants, of whom but twelve hundred remain alive. Everywhere the eye meets with skulls and mutilated corpses, half eaten by dogs, what these have left partially enveloped in tatters of clothing. Children's remains are known by their small size, and women's by their long hair. Many are charred. Near the church, the ground was covered with skeletons, skulls, and putrifying flesh. Betwixt church and school, they lay in heaps. The churchyard was three feet deep with these ghastly objects; the church itself still worse, sights never to be imagined. In the school, two hundred women and children had been roasted alive. Seven thousand bodies had been lying in the sun since May the 12th. The fiend who perpetrated all this, Aohmed Aga, has received promotion; being, moreover, still Governor of the district, that he has thus desolated; and, from this one town alone (which formerly paid a war contribution of a million piastres), the authorities are now, to Sir Henry Elliot's newly awakened consternation, actually demanding of the miserable survivors one hundred thousand piastres, while the harvest is rotting in the fields, its owners in the churchyard, all the cattle driven off by the murderers, and no help of any kind afforded by the merciless authorities. These are what the First Minister of the tender-hearted Queen Victoria has the hardihood to style "imaginary atrocities." Such was not Cromwell's answer to the cry for relief that reached his ears from Piedmont. He ordered a general fast, and made a national contribution to the surviving sufferers of forty thousand pounds; while Milton, his Secretary, called upon God—  "Avenge, 0 Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones Lie scattered on the Alpine Mountains cold, Slain by the bloody, Piemontese that rolled Mother with infant down the rocks."