The Forest of Dean Examiner : — 1876-08-25 (Blakeney, Gloucestershire, England)

AUGUST 25, 1876.  THE BULGARIAN OUTRAGES.  Even our jaunty Premier must begin to doubt the tender mercies of his Turkisliproteges, and believe that they have gone a little too far in Bulgaria, in tossing helpl.s infants into the air to oatch them on the sword-point, in violating and murdering thousands of women, in rus,esacring their husbands, fathers, and brothers, and in burning more than 70 villages. No doubt he is well pleased that awkward questions that must Le answered, cannot he put in Parliament for another s: •: 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 inhabitant., in the shape of taxes so heavy that the poor people could not pay them. Only in a few villages, however, did disturbances take plaoe, and at no time were there more than one thousand insurgents in some in Bulgaria 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 Basouks, compared with whom banditti are inoffensive, were let loose on the defenceless people, and ho, rote worse than those perpetrated at Cawnpore 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 rained. Thouninds 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 eesistance. With one hand the British people will nobly give to aid the destitute and wills the other—as a nation—they will give more/ support to the : amiable Turk. We have been propping up the .Sick Man" for many years on the 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 beeo better served by such a policy au Lord John Russell now recommends. That policy is the placing of a Christian monarch on the throne at Conetantinople to govern European Turkey, in which , the Christians outnumber the Makommedans. If this had been impossible, England might wisely have made itself a friend of those Christian nationalitiee do 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 he able to stamp out. England has done all it could to drive those people to look to Ruesia as their riatund protector and deliverer, while it might hove found that, strength in the East 11 which it is though desirable to have to prevent the onward march of the Ruse, by making itself a friend of the oppre; sod. Our Prime Minister, however, condemns revolution against tioverri. meats, 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 aware, though a political paradox, he will by many be thought right in his conclusions, and English history and English sympathy appear at fault.