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I. The Introduction.

The lesson, which the Turkish Government has conveyed to its Mahometan subjects by its conduct since last May in the matter of the Bulgarian rising, cannot 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 conveyed; 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 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 extent 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 bloodstained 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 complicity 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 unblushingly 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 abroad, had been restored, and that life, honour, and property were secure under a calumniated but really paternal Government.

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 110 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 page 4 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 indulgence, 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 to view in a dark and fatal consistency. It matters not who was Sultan or who was Vizir. Rushdi was as Mahmoud, and Midhat was as Rushdi, and Edhem thus far is as Midhat. There is a point of development and ripeness in a series of acts, at which tendency becomes proof of purpose; as there is also a point in the accumulation of evidence, at which not to sec 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, demonstrate 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 wickedness, I can only find it in this. In what we deem atrocity, the Porte sees only energy. What we think crimes, the Porto 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 falsehood, 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 meritorious 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 therefore 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 every-day occurrence, the Porte attempted 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 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.

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IV. After that suppression, after all the streams of blood that had been shed, Bulgarians were imprisoned by thousands, and detained in foul dens under the name of prisons, on the vaguest charges of complicity in the insurrection. Detained (mostly) for long terms, often, when no charge could be formulated 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 miscreants, who had distinguished themselves by superior atrocity.

VI. 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.

VII. We have distinct cases, in which Mahometan Commissioners on the bench shamefully interrupted the proceedings to hinder the course of justice; and 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 peremptory 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 plundered 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 continued; 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 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.

XIV. On the contrary, it is officially denied that any excesses at nil 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 Christians, the Porte, by a counter-proposal of a general amnesty, seeks to cover its own still unpunished agents.

XVI. 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 page 6 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.

XVII. And it may now be stilted 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 ease has not been the manufacture of false complaints by the Bulgarians, but the terror of recollection, and the terror of anticipation, 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 language 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, 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 in- page 7 significant 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 cumulative 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 original intentions of the Porte. I state this, however, not as demonstration, but as reasonable inference.