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 L I E) RAR.Y 
 
 OF THE 
 
 U N IVLRSITY 
 
 or ILLI NOIS
 
 €l)t eastern (©uedtion a^sJociatiom 
 
 PAPERS on THE EASTERN QUESTION. 
 
 No. 1. 
 
 EVIDEiNCES OF TURKISH 
 
 MISRULE 
 
 HENRY RICHARD, M.P. 
 
 PUBLISHED FOR THE 
 
 EASTERN QUESTION ASSOCIATION, 
 
 28, CANADA BUILDING, WESTMINSTER; 
 
 BY 
 
 CAS SELL FETTER & GALPIN, 
 London, Paris &^ New York.
 
 *J" It is necessary to state, in order to explain some 
 
 expressiojis that 7nay occur in the first part of this 
 
 panipJilet^ that nearly all that portion of it relating to the 
 
 condition of Tnrkey iip to the time of the Crimean 
 
 War, was first published in the year 1855.
 
 EVIDENCES OF TURKISH MISRULE. 
 
 No greater mistake could be committed than to imagine that the 
 recent atrocities in Bulgaria and other Turkish provinces are isolated 
 and exceptional events. The saddest thing connected with these 
 eruptions of brutal violence is the conviction which forces itself on 
 those who have studied the condition of the country, that they are 
 only symptoms of deep-seated and incurable disorders inherent in the 
 constitution of Turkish rule. The Ottoman Turks have been en- 
 camped for more than four centuries in Europe, During that time 
 they have been brought into contact with every form of European 
 civilisation ; but they have remained so obstinately impervious to all 
 the influences brought to bear upon them, that we are at last con- 
 strained to the conclusion that they have no capacity for civilisation, 
 or if they have, it has certainly not been yet developed. They can 
 fight desperately enough ; but that is the note of barbarism, not of 
 civilisation. When they cease to fight, they seem to fall into a normal 
 state of sloth, sensuality, and decay. Or if they show any sign of 
 vigour, it is the ruthless oppression, every now and then culminating 
 into massacre, which they practise on those who have the misery to 
 be placed in their power. 
 
 The country they occupy is suffering from every species of misrule 
 with which a country can be afflicted. Over many a wide expanse 
 the soil, though naturally the richest and most fertile on the face of 
 the earth, lies waste and desolate. All means of material improve- 
 ment — roads, bridges, mines, docks, harbours — are utterly neglected. 
 Taxation is levied in forms as grinding and oppressive as the utmost 
 ingenuity of cupidity and fanaticism can devise. What is ironically 
 called the administration of justice is itself a mere instrument of 
 extortion and torture. All efforts of the population to rise in intelli- 
 gence, industry, and wealth are sternly repressed, and whatever pro- 
 gress they make is made in spite of their rulers. The spectacle which 
 Volney saw, and so vividly depicted ninety years ago, still remains. 
 Speaking of Asiatic Turkey, he said : " Everywhere I saw only tyranny 
 and misery, robbery and devastation. I found daily on my route
 
 abandoned fields, deserted villages, cities in ruin I recalled 
 
 those ancient ages when twenty famous nations existed in these 
 
 countries This Syria, said I, now almost unpeopled, 
 
 could then count a hundred powerful cities ; its fields were covered 
 with towns, villages, hamlets. Everywhere appeared cultivated fields, 
 
 frequented roads, crowded habitations What has become 
 
 of those ages of abundance and of life ? . . . . Where are those 
 labourers, those harvests, those flocks, and that crowd of living beings 
 that then covered the face of the earth ? Alas ! I have surveyed this 
 savage land, I have visited the places which were the theatre of so 
 much splendour, and have seen only solitude and desertion. The 
 temples are crumbled down ; the palaces are overthrown ; the ports 
 are filled up ; the cities are destroyed ; the earth, stripped of its 
 inhabitants, is only a desolate place of tombs." 
 
 How is the representation we have given of the state of Turkey 
 proved? By the evidence of a great cloud of witnesses, who have 
 visited the country and have been acquainted with its internal condi- 
 tion for the last fifty years. Among them are men of various nations, 
 of all characters and classes — ambassadors, consuls, travellers, mer- 
 chants, missionaries, engineers, &c. Their concurrence of testimony 
 affords overwhelming proof that in every respect the rule of the Turks 
 has been a blight and a curse to all the lands over which that rule 
 extends. 
 
 This is owing to no want of effort on the part of other Powers, or 
 of promises on their part. Every kind of influence has been brought 
 to bear upon them to induce them to amend their ways — persuasion, 
 remonstrance, menace, friendly aid in the management of their 
 affairs, armed intervention, bloody and desolating wars. These 
 means have indeed elicited from time to time abundant proclamations 
 of good-will and generous intentions, and even of solemn engagements 
 in the form of irades, hatti-i-sheriffs, and hatti-i-humaions. But after 
 a century's experience Christian nations are obliged to say — 
 
 " They patler with us in a double sense : 
 They keep the word of promise to our ear, 
 And break it to our hope." 
 
 It would be easy to multiply tenfold the evidence given in the 
 ensuing pages. With the rarest possible exception every traveller 
 who visits Turkey bears the same witness. 
 
 Opinions of Travellers and Others on the State of 
 Turkey. 
 
 And first of all, let us give a series oi opinions, founded upon personal 
 ■observation, pronounced by travellers who have visited the Ottoman 

 
 dominions, as to whether that country is in a state of progress or 
 decay. We will begin with M. de Lamartine, who, though in some 
 respects an extravagant admirer and eulogist of the Turkish character, 
 was compelled by what he observed during his travels in the East to 
 come to the following conclusion : — 
 
 "The Turks, by the inherent and iiTeclaimable viciousness of their 
 administration and of their habits, are incapable of governing their present 
 territoiy in Europe and Asia, or either of them. They have depopulated the 
 countries which oxATied their sway, and have destroyed themselves by the slow 
 suicide of their government." — Travels in the East, p. 752. 
 
 And in the year 1834, during a debate in the French Chamber of 
 Deputies, he repeated the same opinion in terms still more emphatic : — 
 
 ' ' The Ottoman empire is no empire at all ; it is a misshapen agglomera- 
 tion of different races without cohesion between them, with mingled interests, 
 without a language, without laws, without religion, without unity or stability 
 of power. You see the breath of life which animated it — namely, religious 
 fanaticism — is extinct. You see that its fatal and blinded administration has 
 devoured the race of conquerors; ami that Turkey is perishing for ivant of 
 Tiirks.^^ 
 
 IMr. J. L. Stephens, the American traveller, who was in that region 
 in 1835, describes the city of Constantinople in these words : — 
 
 ' ' We float around the walls of the seraglio, enter the Golden Horn, and 
 before us, with its thousand mosques, and its myriad of minarets, their golden 
 points glittering in the sun, is the Roman city of Constantinople, the Thracian 
 Byzantium, the Stamboul of the Turks; the city which more than all others 
 excites the imagination and interests the feelings; once dividing with Rome 
 the empire of the world ; built by a Christian emperor, and consecrated as a 
 Christian city ; ' a burning and a shining light ' in a season of universal dark- 
 ness, all at once lost to the civilised world, falling into the hands of a strange 
 and fanatical people, the gloomy followers of a successful soldier ; a city which 
 for nearly four centuries has sat with its gates closed in sullen distrust and 
 haughty defiance of strangers ; which once sent forth large and terrible annies, 
 burning, slaying, and destroying, shaking the hearts of princes and people — 
 7iaiu lying, like a sullen giant, huge, nniuieldly, and helpless, ready to fall into 
 the hands of the first invader, and dragging ont a precarious and ignoble 
 existence, but by the mercy or policy of the great Christian Pozvers.'''' — Incidents 
 of Travels in Turkey, p. 54. 
 
 We will take next the opinion of Mr. Eliot Warburton, as able 
 and accomplished a man as ever visited the East: — 
 
 " Sultan Mahmoud was one of the five great men who have been the 
 instruments of signalising our age. He ventured on the glorious attemjDt which 
 few have survived, and none have ever lived to see accomplished — that of 
 regenerating a corrupt people. The attempt failed utterly, as regarded the 
 creation of new powers and capacities : the old zi<ere destroyed, but there was no 
 reproductive principle in the Turkish character. .... They are a gallant
 
 people yet, those Osmanlis ; and, though they feel that their empire is drawing 
 to a close, and are prepared for the fulfilment of one of those strange old 
 prophecies, like that which prepared the Yncas for the subjugation of their 
 country, they will doubtless die fearlessly in defence of those walls so fearlessly 
 won by their fierce ancestors." — Crescent and the Cross, p. 390. 
 
 Mr. White, in his " Three Years in Constantinople," after showing 
 the utter failure of the Gul Hana edict, which initiated the reform, 
 adverts to the proposal advanced by some to preserve Turkey from 
 utter decay, by raising the different races of which the empire consists 
 into an equality of political privileges with the dominant race, and 
 thus replies to it: — 
 
 " But when commerce, industry, intelligence, knowledge, activity, rapidly 
 augmenting population — in short, all the ingredients and incentives to progress 
 and liberty, are on one side, and when comparative ignorance, prejudice, 
 apathy, aversion to speculation and foreign trade, with stationary population, 
 are the characteristics of the other, it is fair to argue that many years would 
 not elapse before the progressing factions would take the lead, and rulers and 
 ruled would change places." 
 
 Dr. Alton, who in 1853 described himself as having "so lately 
 traversed the empire South and North," states it as his opinion, "that 
 Turkey is not worth the preserving, and it were impossible for the two 
 Western Powers to preserve it, were it even worth while." He then 
 quotes the conflicting views expressed by Mr. Cobden and Lord 
 Palmerston in the House of Commons, and adds : — 
 
 "We differ entirely from the sentiments of Lord Palmerston, and, as a 
 traveller not long returned from Turkey, we give our testimony decidedly in 
 favour of Mr. Cobden's statement as being nearer the truth." — The Drying up 
 of the Euphrates, or the Doiviif all of Turkey, by John Alton, D.D., p. 56. 
 
 Mr. Fowler, in his " History of the Ottoman Empire," published 
 more than twenty years ago, says : — 
 
 "The ejection of the Turk from Europe is now becoming a most desirable 
 event — and even a little farther, perhaps, than Europe would ultimately prove 
 beneficial ; but he may have a chance of reformation in Asia, if he is suscep- 
 tible of it, though many regard him as an exhausted specime?i of humanity.'" 
 
 Mr. Walsh says : — 
 
 " There is more of human life wasted and less supplied (in Turkey) than 
 
 in'any other country We see every day life going out in the fairest 
 
 portion of Europe, and the human race threatened with extinction in a soil and 
 climate capable of siipporting the jnost abundant population." — Kings of the East, 
 pp. 2— II. 
 
 The Rev. Archibald Boyd repeats the same melancholy tale : — 
 ' * Altogether decay seems to have written herself in characters so legible 
 upon Turks and Turkey, upon natures and institutions, as to suggest the 
 conclusion that such a people cannot be expected long to maintain a natiottal
 
 existence, and, perhaps, to force upon the mind the question, whether it be for 
 the interests of humanity and civilisation that they should be allowed to retain 
 possessions which are clearly misplaced in their hands." 
 
 And lastly, under this head, we give the opinion of Mr. Thacke- 
 ray :— 
 
 "The Government of the Ottoman Porte seems to be as rotten, as 
 wrinkled, and as feeble as the old eunuch I saw crawling about it in the sun." 
 — Notes of a Journey from Corn kill to Grand Cairo. 
 
 Then take the opinions of some distinguished European states- 
 men. The Earl of Clarendon, writing to Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, 
 our ambassador at Constantinople, February 25, 1853, requests him to 
 say to the Sultan : — 
 
 " The accumulated grievances of foreign nations, which the Porte is unable 
 or unwilling to redress, the mal-administration of its own affair's, and the in- 
 creasing weakness of executive power in Turkey, have caused the allies of the 
 Porte latterly to assume a tone alike novel and alarming, and which, if per- 
 severed in, may lead to a general revolt among the Christian subjects of the 
 Porte, and prove fatal to the independence and integrity of the empire— a 
 catastrophe that would be deeply deplored by Her Majesty's Government, but 
 which it is their duty to repi-esent to the Porte, is considered probable and 
 impending by som» of the great European Powers." 
 
 # # # # * 
 
 ** Nor will yoii disguise from the Sultan and his Ministers that perseverance 
 in their present course must end in alienating the sympathies of the British 
 nation, and making it impossible for Her Majesty'' s Government to shelter them 
 from the impending danger, or to overlook the exigencies of Christendom, exposed 
 to the natural conseqicences of their unwise policy and reckless mal-adminis- 
 tration. " 
 
 Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, in a speech delivered at a banquet 
 ^iven to him at Constantinople in 1852, deplores ''''the corruption 
 which eats into the very foundations of society^ and a conibinatioji of 
 force ^ frand., and intrigue which obstruct the march of progress, and 
 poison the very atmosphere in which they prevail." And again he 
 refers, with profound grief, " to the signs of weakness and error which 
 surround him, to the financial embarrassments of the Government, 
 and the great charter issued by the present Sultan being discredited 
 by the non-execution of its promises." 
 
 AL Guizot says : — 
 
 "Christian Europe has reason to desire that no private ambition may 
 hasten the downfall of those dilapidated Mussulman states that are languishing 
 and falling into min at her gates. . . . Providence, however, has issued 
 visible decrees, and we have a right to be pre-conscious of these, and to hold 
 ourselves in readiness to acknowledge them. The Turks will go out of 
 Europe. The Christian faith and Christian civilisation will not give up their 
 -expansive energy. . . . It is an act of prudence as well as of moral sense
 
 8 
 
 for all Christian states to jDay great regard to this in their policy, and not 
 to place themselves in direct and permanent conflict with facts which will 
 infallibly one day come to pass, and which, when they do come to pass, will 
 be a triumph for humanity." — Gnizofs " Life of Peel,' ^ p. 162. 
 
 M. de Tocqueville, writing to Mr. Senior, says : — 
 "What say you of our friends the Turks? Was it worth while to spend 
 so much money and to shed so much blood in order to retain in Europe 
 savages who are ill disguised as civihsed men?" — Life, vol. ii., p. 414. 
 
 The Material Condition of Turkey. 
 
 In regard %o the internal condition of the country, its progress in 
 agriculture and commerce, its means of communication, the state of 
 civilisation, social security and comfort enjoyed by the inhabitants — 
 what is the impression produced on the minds of impartial and 
 intelligent observers by the present aspect of Turkey? After con- 
 sulting all the most recent travellers to whose works we could gain 
 access, we are constrained to come to the same conclusion as a writer 
 in the Edinburgh Review in 1854, who says : — 
 
 '* Amidst all its pretensions to reform, every dispassionate observer of the 
 state of the Turkish empire brings back fresh evidence of its decay ; and even, 
 those sanguine Orientalists who speak of its progress cannot deny that the 
 population of the Turkish race is rapidly declining — that the most fertile 
 regions of the Old World are smitten with the curse of barrenness under their 
 rule — that the cessation of the fierce and brutal control once exercised over the 
 country by the Sultans has only secured greater impunity to corruption, and 
 that the internal condition of the Government and the empire is one of 
 
 hopeless confusion Never was a state so instructed in the infancy 
 
 of its civilisation, or so nursed in the decrepitude of its age ; and we owe the 
 innumerable productions which load our table on the subject to the experience 
 of a vast number of persons engaged in these meritorious efforts. Lt is 
 remarkable thai not one of them in whose veracity and independence confidence 
 can be placed ventures to boast of his success,'''' 
 
 But as we are anxious to let our readers judge for themselves, 
 we subjoin a series of extracts from various travellers who have 
 visited the country. We begin with Mr. Spencer, w^ho, about the 
 year 1848, passed through all the provinces of European Turkey, and 
 wdiose competency to form a judgment no man can doubt who has 
 read his very able and interesting work. Were we to cite all the 
 illustrations he furnishes of the decaying and deplorable condition of 
 the country, we should have to transcribe a large proportion of the 
 two goodly volumes before us. 
 
 Adverting to a few patches of cultivation he had witnessed in 
 passing through one part of Macedonia, he says : — 
 
 " These indications of agricultural industry are never met with except in 
 the vicinity of a village, and these are few and far between ; for this fine plain,.
 
 so fertile and productive, is very thinly inhabited, being for the most part 
 covered with rank grass, prickly shrubs, and forests of thistles, often attaining 
 a height of seven feet. We also met a number of small lakes and stagnant 
 marshes, caused by the overflowing of the rivers, sending forth their noxious 
 vapours, and producing those intermittent fevers so fatal to the inhabitants of 
 this part of Macedonia — an evil which could easily be obviated by removing 
 the accumulation of sand -banks that bar the passage of the waters through a 
 plain with so inconsiderable a descent to the sea ; but here, as elsewhere in 
 these provinces, the Turkish Government exhibits the most supine indifference 
 in ever)'thing that concerns its own interests, and the millions of human beings 
 committed to its charge. We have already said that there are no roads ; a 
 bridge is seldom met with, and when it is, frequently so out of repair that we 
 preferred swimming our horses over the river to crossing it. 
 
 " It avails nothing to the general prosperity of a countiy to possess fine 
 seas, navigable rivers, rich mines, a fertile soil, salubrious climate, and every 
 material for the creation of industrious wealth — all of which the Osmanli has 
 in these provinces. There must be the means of bringing these resources into 
 action by safe and easy means of internal communication, otherwise the country 
 must continue to remain a terra incognita, and its inhabitants sink still lower 
 in the slough of barbarism, . . . Yet if we expatiate on these advantages 
 to an Osmanli, whose narrow mind refuses to advance beyond the narrow circle 
 of his forefathers, he will tell you that the empire has prospered, and still 
 prospers, without the introduction of such unnecessary Frank innovations as 
 carriage roads, bridges and canals, which could have no other effect than to 
 facilitate an invasion of their old enemies, the Russians and the Austrians," — 
 Vol. ii,, pp, 47, 48, 
 
 In describing his journey through Thrace, adverting to the rare 
 spectacle of " seemingly Avell-cultivated estates " belonging to one 
 Bey, he says : — 
 
 "A welcome sight to the traveller in these provinces, luho may travel from 
 sea to sea, frotn the Danube to Constantinople^ without beholding the slightest 
 mark of improvemeyit either in the aspect of the country or the industry of the 
 inhabitants. About ten years ago, I ti'aversed nearly the same route from 
 Constantinople to the Danube. The country was without roads, as it is now, 
 and several of the bridges that then existed have been carried away by 
 the flood, or fallen from decay, without either the inhabitants or the Govern- 
 ment attempting to replace them. ... It is not alone the absence of any 
 change for the better that so forcibly arrests the attention of the traveller, as 
 the deep settled gloom that characterises countiy, town, village, people, wher- 
 ever the Osmanli rales." — Vol. ii., pp. 361-2. 
 
 And Mr. Spencer sums up the result of his observations on the 
 whole country in the following emphatic passage : — 
 
 " Four centuries have passed away since the Crescent replaced the Cross on 
 the dome of Saint Sophia, and the empire of Constantine crumbled before 
 the might of Othman ; four centuries of ever-increasing intellect, civilisation, 
 and prosperity.
 
 lO 
 
 "Nations then semi -barbaric, have not only emerged from the darkness of 
 the middle ages into the full light of the great epoch in which we now live, 
 but their population, as it were, culminating from the very acme of civilisation, 
 have borne their talent, industry, and energy, to the most distant regions of the 
 habitable world. The wilderness has been cultivated, and the desert peopled ; 
 cities have been founded, and railroads laid down in what were, at the period 
 of the Ottoman conquest, the undisturbed solitudes of primceval nature ; and 
 nations, great and powerful, have sprang into existence in quarters of the globe 
 then imdiscovered. Yet, when the traveller, fresh from the busy scenes of 
 active life, industry, and usefulness, visits the land of the Crescent, expecting 
 to meet with similar evidences of progress and improvement, and seeing none, 
 exclaims : Where are the monuments of the power and the energy of the mighty 
 people M'ho laid the Christian empire of the East in the dust ? Where are the 
 proofs that they have for four centuries had dominion over one of the most 
 beautiful and fertile countries in our hemisphere ? Where ! — the undrained 
 marsh, the sand-choked river, the grass-grown market-place, the deserted 
 field, the crumbling fortress, the broken arch ; these re-echo, where ! Stag- 
 nation, death-like stagnation, has ever characterised the rule of the race of 
 Othman. . . . 
 
 "Crushed and degraded below the level of humanity, genei'ation after 
 generation of the unhappy Christians of these provinces of European Turkey 
 have passed away like the leaves of the forest, without leaving a vestige 
 behind to tell that they existed. Unheeded and uncared for by those nations 
 of Europe who were employing every energy to reclaim from his savage state 
 the swarthy son of distant India and Africa, and make him a participator in 
 the blessings of civilisation and revealed religion, forgetful of the shame and 
 reproach that lay at their very threshold ; forgetful that while the life-blood of 
 Europe quickened the extremities of the universe, a portion of her very self 
 remained torpid and corpse-like." — Vol. i., p. 2. 
 
 Let us next take the testimony of Mr. Crowe on this point, who 
 represents the effects of Turkish rule as being as blighting and per- 
 nicious in Asia Minor as in Europe : — 
 
 "This Asia Minor is, indeed, the greatest disgrace of the Turk, the chief 
 accusation that raises itself against the Ottoman. It is a land capable of the 
 greatest fertility and production, traversed by numbers of rivers— a blessing so 
 rare in so southern a clime. It abounds in ports and minerals. It commands 
 two seas, lies between north, and south, and west, and offers itself as the great 
 channel of communication between the different parts of the globe. There is 
 no country in the world with so many of the elements and capabilities of 
 prosperity. Yet for centuries it has been a desert, a land of oppressors and 
 poverty, spoliation and torture, the very charnel-house of the human kind, 
 counting ten millions of Turks, who can neither thrive nor live industi'ious 
 themselves, nor allow others to do so. Talk of Turkey in Europe, and of the 
 state of the Christian rayahs under the Turks — they are ten times more happy, 
 and the country some hundred times more prosperous and rich, with the small 
 element of a Christian population, even oppressed by the Turks, than can be 
 found in the land which the Turks may be said to have all to themselves. 
 " — The Greek and the Turk, ^^. 1']^, 1"]^ .
 
 II 
 
 No less explicit is the language of Mr. Bayle St. John, also a 
 traveller in Turkey, in his Avork entitled, "The Turks in Europe." 
 
 "We have but to cast a glance over the vast provinces which stretch from 
 the banks of the Danube to the hmits of constitutional Greece, to see the 
 natural results of the system I have described, carried on by a people so 
 brutal and barbarous as the Turks. These provinces do not contain one 
 quarter of the population they are capable of supporting, and, unlike other 
 countries, the plains are almost desert, whilst the mountains and a few large 
 cities contain the chief part of the inhabitants. Wherever tliere is a centre of 
 Turkish authority established, a wilderness is at once created around. The 
 greater proportion of the Bulgarian population is dispersed in villages far from 
 the high roads, and a wholesome terror, as I have hinted in a previous chapter, 
 is from time to time struck into them by invasions of armed tax-gatherers. 
 Nothing can be more melancholy than a journey southward from the Danube 
 towards Constantinople. The Bulgarians are naturally a mild and good 
 people, but, as is well known, they have more than once been goaded by 
 
 excessive oppression into rebellion If we traverse the Balkan 
 
 range, and enter upon the vast plains of Thrace, the deserts become naturally 
 more dismal than ever. We are approaching the capital. Adrianople is 
 surrounded by vast expanses covered with cemeteries, and the whole country 
 between that city and Constantinople seems as if it had been just visited by a 
 pestilence. It consists of a vast undulating plain, entirely denuded of trees, 
 and cut up by numerous streams of water, which were once bordered by 
 flourishing towns and fields. Now and then a miserable hamlet occurs ; but 
 there are places in which during twelve hours of hard marching there is not a 
 house visible, not a tree, not a shrub." — P. 154. 
 
 The following is the language of Mr. Fowler on this point : — 
 
 "The climate of European Turkey is perhaps superior to that of any other 
 region of Europe ; the seasons succeed each other with great regularity ; the 
 atmosphere is extremely salubrious, and friendly to the human constitution ; 
 but we see this magnificent country, which neai-ly equals France in extent, 
 and is superior to it in fertility and the variety of its productions, for the most 
 part a desert, and devoid of population. The magnificence of the scenery 
 is occasionally marred by the sight of crvimbling towns and villages, tl>e 
 result of the blight of despotism, which, having ground down the labouring 
 agriculturist beyond the power of endurance, he has abandoned to tyranny 
 the soil on which he once located, and is gone to seek another pre- 
 carious home Immense territories in Southern Europe now lie 
 
 waste that might be gilt every year with luxuriant corn-fields. The barbarous 
 government of Turkey has laid waste some of the richest gardens and com 
 districts of the old world. Turkey in Europe, if well governed, might be as 
 rich a country as France or Germany. Corn-fields and vineyards might cover 
 its millions of acres, and those very provinces of which Russia has now taken 
 possession would, no doubt, under Russian protection, and regular govern- 
 ment, however tyrannical and restrictive, increase their agricultural and 
 commercial wealth to an indefinite extent ; but so long as they remain tender the 
 mal-administration of the Turk, -who is neither a farmer nor a man of business,
 
 12 
 
 and thinks it beneath the dignity of his character to folloiv any other profession 
 than that of soldier and tax-gatherer, and who thinks all farmers and merchants 
 only the legitimate prey of agas and pashas, there is no hope of amelioration^ — 
 History of the Ottomaft Empire, pp. 298—300. 
 
 We will next produce a French witness, M. Blanqui, who was sent 
 by Louis-Philippe on a mission to Bulgaria and Constantinople in 
 1 841, and who published his observations in 1845, in a work entitled 
 "Voyage en Bulgarie": — 
 
 "From Adrianople to Constanfinople is a distance of about fifty leagues. 
 The vast space between the two cities is entirely destitute of trees, and pre- 
 sents the aspect of a long, wide, undulating plain, traversed by more than 
 thirty watercourses 
 
 "There is something moi-e tristful in the unparalleled journey between 
 these two capital cities. This is the countless number of cemeteries one finds 
 in places where every sign of human habitation has disappeared. What 
 signify these cemeteries ? When were they formed ? Why do they exist in 
 their entirety, while one cannot find the slightest trace of the towns and 
 villages which stocked them with so many dead? .... 
 
 "But there are things even more sad than these cemeteries without 
 villages — I mean villages without inhabitants. I saw a good many such 
 between Adrianople and Constantinople : the houses were oj^en to wind and 
 rain, the roofs had fallen in, the domestic hearth was empty. Lizards, rats, 
 screech-owls, bats, had taken the place of human beings, destroyed by plague 
 or by poverty, or dispersed by emigration ; and these villages were surrounded 
 by fertile lands, and everywhere flowed rivulets and brooks, and the sky over- 
 head was pure and serene ; and if, now and then, a tree existed near a 
 fountain, it was so grand and so beautiful, that fifty men on horseback might 
 shelter themselves in its shades. What, then, has transformed these fertile 
 countries of Thrace into desolated steppes? What but Mussjilman barbarity? 
 The mosque alone stands erect in the midst of the ruins which it has caused. 
 The only living creatures we saw were birds of prey 
 
 "The desert extends to the very ramparts of Constantinople. As we 
 approached the capital we expected to find some sign of road-making; there 
 was none. The Turks have everything to begin.''^ 
 
 Another intelligent foreigner, an officer in the Prussian service, 
 Hubert von Boehm, who some years ago visited Turkey, speaks in 
 the following terms : — 
 
 "By a system of falsehood and misrepresentation the Porte has succeeded^ 
 to some extent, in turning a little of our general attention from the embroiled 
 and incomprehensible affairs of Turkey, and so much the more as during the 
 last few years nearly every country in Europe has been absorbed by its own 
 internal affairs ; but the Turkish Government has carried this system of deceit 
 too far for the safety of its integi-ity. By hastily building up fragile imitations 
 of European institutions without bases, it has given flagrant evidences of its 
 imbecility and enervation ; and by no means of its striving for civilisation, or 
 awakening to intrinsic new strength, as has been so often and so loudly 
 trumpeted by its Journal de Constantinople
 
 " Of all the great resources of the Turkish empire, little more has remained 
 than a neglected and thinly-populated land, and a lazy, strengthless popula- 
 tion. Richly as nature has endowed the land, man has recklessly turned its 
 gifts into curses. The forests lie waste, the fields uncultivated, and the most 
 fruitful and most beautiful districts, changed into dreary deserts, are no longer 
 able to nourish a tribe of beggars. The rule of the Turks has not built a 
 village nor tilled an acre, nay, hardly planted a tree ; and the often-dreamt-of 
 southern vegetation has hidden itself in some corners of the Bosphorus ! The 
 stranger, Avho knows Turkey only from historical traditions about her former 
 power and splendour, may well be astonished, on his first visit, at the misery 
 and the ignorance that mle unboundedly over the land. 
 
 " But, say the defenders of the Government, the countiy is in a state of 
 transition ; some of the worst traits of Turkish despotism have disappeared, 
 and it requires only time to remedy all the evils. Alas ! Time knows only a 
 sad and comfortless tale to tell of sickness and imbecility; and it requires 
 more than blind fatalism to rescue the land from threatening laiin. 
 
 "The robber-like rapacity of former Ottoman governments, and the 
 venality of all state officers, are too well known to require proofs. Thereby a 
 feeling of fear and insecurity was engendered, which soon penetrated all minds 
 in such a manner that the endeavours of every individual were only directed 
 how to hide his o^vn property and to appear poorer than he was. 
 
 ** At present artifices and disguise are no longer of use ; the misery and the 
 unspeakable filth shown by the great mass are the real expression of the state 
 of things ; and the treasures accumulated in former days are in the hands of 
 few. In the face of these undeniable facts the Turkish papers assert that the 
 social and material condition of the country has improved ! In all European 
 papers such untruths find an echo, and even in Constantinople men allow 
 themselves to be deceived by them." 
 
 The Earl of Carlisle visited Turkey just before the Crimean war, 
 and his verdict as to the condition of the country is summed up in the 
 following emphatic words : — 
 
 ** When you leave the partial splendours of the capital and the great state 
 establishments, what is it you find over this broad surface of a land which 
 nature and climate have favoured beyond all others, once the home of all art 
 and all civilisation ? Look yourself, — ask those who live there ; — deserted 
 villages, uncultivated plains, banditti-haunted mountains, torpid laws, a 
 corrupted administration, a disappearing people." — Diary hi Turkish and 
 Greek Waters, p. 184. 
 
 Religious Liberty in Turkey. 
 
 Next, let us inquire into the question of religious liberty, and 
 the condition of the rayahs, or the Christian population of Turkey. 
 On no subject is there more egregious misconception than on this. 
 It is proclaimed, with the utmost confidence, that the Government 
 of the Porte is a perfect pattern of impartiality and dignified toleration, 
 — that whatever may have been the oppressions practised in times past 
 upon Christians in that empire, all that has long ago given place to
 
 14 
 
 the reign of complete religious equality. And on what evidence are 
 these bold assertions made ? Why, on the evidence of the tanzimats^ 
 or decrees, every now and then issued by the Sultan, which command 
 his Mussulman officials everywhere to treat their Christian fellow- 
 subjects with forbearance and kindness, and grant them full liberty in 
 the exercise of their religion. Nothing can sound fairer, certainly, 
 than these proclamations, but the unanimous testimony of travellers 
 proves, that, beyond the walls of Constantinople, they are little more 
 than so much waste paper. " Habits of toleration and decrees of 
 equality," said the Edmburgh Review in 1854, are a ''dead letter 
 beyond the diameter of the capital ; and we venture to affirm that 
 more acts of cruelty and extortion are still perpetrated in the Turkish 
 empire than in all those countries of Europe which habitually inspire 
 us with the strongest commiseration. Within the last ten years, 
 wholesale massacres of Christians have taken place in Asia Minor." 
 And now for the proofs, which unhappily are too abundant. 
 
 "With every desire to amend the condition of the rayah, the evil still 
 remains — religious prejudice and caste — to frustrate the intentions of the most 
 just and equitable Government, and must continue, so long as the laws are 
 administered by a fanatic, ignorant Mussulman. The traveller is daily re- 
 minded of this in his intercourse with Turk and rayah — in the one he sees an 
 overbearing ignorance, and in the other a humiliating degradation. In 
 obedience to the old Mohammedan laws, a rayah is restricted from using 
 certain colours when he paints his house or decorates his person. He is not 
 permitted to enter a town on horseback, if it is the residence of a Turkish 
 dignitary ; should he meet with one during his route, he must descend till he 
 passes, or escape by another direction ; the meanest Turk holds the power to 
 send him on an errand, or make him carry a package ; if struck by one he 
 dares not resent the injury ; and should he by chance meet a Turkish lady, he 
 is not allowed to look at her, since it is possible he may blight her good fortune 
 with the evil eye. It is true the higher class of rayahs, such as merchants 
 and traders, inhabitants of towns, aware of their newly-acquired rights, do not 
 humiliate themselves in the presence of a Mussulman ; but the poor rayah of 
 the village and the commune, ignorant of the privileges which have been 
 accorded to him, still obeys, and, like a good Christian, if he is struck on the 
 right cheek turns the left ; and should he be sufficiently daring to assert his 
 rights and refuse the homage required by the privileged class, the whip of the 
 oppressor quickly reminds him that his emancipation is nominal so long as the 
 Turk remains in authority."— »S)>^«^^r, i. 244. 
 
 Let it be distinctly borne in mind that this intelligent traveller 
 speaks as the result of his own personal observation in every part 
 of European Turkey. In the second volume he returns to the subject 
 in the following terms : — 
 
 "Thus, the poor Rayah whose patient industry supports Sultan, Church 
 and State, is robbed of his last para for the benefit of the pasha, the bishop, 
 and a host of employees, down to the lowest tchiboukji. Should fair means
 
 15 
 
 fail to extract fi-om him the wages of his labour, recourse is had to violence, 
 till nothing remains to him, save the miserable hut in which he lives with his 
 wife and children : these, if possessing personal attractions, are not always 
 safe from wretches who carry a brace of loaded pistols to enforce submission. 
 
 "Human endurance can bear no more. The abject rayah asserts the 
 rights of man, and flies to arms ; but alas ! his weapons are nothing better 
 than his implements of husbandry, which he can oppose with little effect 
 against powder and ball. The tacticoes and arnouts are called out, cannon 
 is employed to put down the revolt, and while the poor rayah dies courageously 
 in the field, his wife and children are frequently consumed among the embers of 
 their cabin — the victims of Turkish misrule. Such was the state of a large 
 district in Bulgaria, the extensive pachalic of Widdin, when I arrived at 
 Sophia in 1850. 
 
 " The inhabitants of Western Europe have probably heard of the insurrection 
 of Bulgaria, but they cannot entertain the remotest idea of the horrors that 
 accompanied it ; and although, thank Heaven ! I was spared the misery 
 of witnessing the contest, the spioking villages that I saw during my route 
 to the Danube, the blackened bones of the inmates, the number of dead 
 bodies that still lay about in defiles and gorges, preyed upon by Avolves and 
 half-wild dogs, told a fearful tale of bitter animosity, and how desperate had 
 been the struggle. When it was too late, the Turkish Government ordered an 
 inquiry to be made as to the cause ; but we presume as Zia Pasha, the author 
 of all this misery and bloodshed, had not politically offended, and was known 
 to be favourable to the views of the Sultan, and an enemy of the anti-reform 
 party, no severer punishment was awarded than a reprimand, and to be 
 deprived of his pachalic. 
 
 " The Bulgarians have neither the bold determination of their neighbours, 
 the Servians, nor the spirit of enterprise, combination, and fiery valour of the 
 (ireeks ; they more resemble the moujik (serf) of Russia — a machine to be 
 guided at the will of a clever engineer. In Upper IVIoesia, and on the banks 
 of the Morava, where they amalgamate with the Servians, and their own 
 Haiducs of the mountains, and in Thrace and Macedonia, where they come 
 in contact with their neighbours, the Greeks, we find them a totally different 
 people ; but here in Old Bulgaria, where they number three millions, they 
 may be compared to a carcass to be preyed upon by eighty thousand 
 Mussulman vultures— that being the number of Turks residing in the towns on 
 the Danube and the Black Sea. Even to this day — notwithstanding the edict 
 of the Sultan, granting them social rights, and abrogating the ancient laws, 
 which compelled the rayah of every rank, except the clergy, to humble 
 himself in the presence of the elect of Mahomet— a Bulgarian, when he enters 
 the hall of audience of a pasha, or a simple aien, is seen crawling on his 
 knees, and bending his neck in abject submission to the man in power. 
 While travelling, he dismounts from his horse till the great man passes ; and 
 in all the small towns and villages the whole population bend like a reed at 
 the nod of the meanest Turk." — Spencer, vol. ii. 
 
 Mr. Crowe, it will be seen by the subjoined extract, declares that 
 even in Constantinople, an^ under the very shadow of the embassies 
 of the great Western Powers, the old fanatical hatred of Christians 
 was most oppressively manifest : —
 
 i6 
 
 "The first feeling of the Frank, Mhen he finds himself in the streets of 
 ■Constantinople, or even of Pera, is one of humiliation. He has just quitted 
 his abode on a vessel where he was treated with respect, and if he came 
 by land, his firman and expenditure will have saved him from being jostled 
 and insulted by those around him. But once in the streets of Constantinople, 
 the Frank cannot be mistaken in perceiving that he is svirrounded by a crowd 
 ■of barbarians, filthy fanatics, and ferocious ruffians, who regard him with 
 ineffable yet undisguised contempt. The looks of the fellows sufficiently 
 express this ; but a very trifling accident, any collision with you or your 
 dragoman, unless the latter be an official Kawas, will call upon your Christian 
 head, and upon those of your relations, a volley of filthy vituperation at 
 which the blood boils. The desire to have this rabble taught their true value 
 and position in the scale of human existence, is the strongest feeling that 
 animates a stranger on first visiting Constantinople. Custom may blunt and 
 politics outweigh susceptibility, as well as the wishes it excites. But however 
 reckless one may become of Turkish execration, and however inimical to the 
 idea of having Russia lording it in the capital of the East, it would afford 
 infinite pleasure to most people to learn that the rabble of Constantinople 
 were kicked into the Bosphorus. 
 
 4^ # » «» « :(» * 
 
 "Very little experience will suffice to show the traveller the immense 
 difficulties in the way of the most liberal Turkish minister to elevate the 
 Christian to anything like even fair tolerance. Row up the Golden Horn to 
 visit the old Christian quarter of the Fanar. You will find oppression and 
 forced humiliation stamped upon every house. Even that of the Patriarch, so 
 powerful and so much talked of, is a dingy, diminutive prison, built of stone, 
 indeed, for security, but craving pardon, by its air and its architecture of 
 meanness, for daring to use so costly a material. The little church, — the only 
 church of the Christian within its walls, — is equally begrimed, equally humble. 
 The very population walk with a bowed expression. And this feeling of self- 
 degradation, of which the European cannot divest himself in any part of 
 Constantinople, becomes in the Fanar so painful that one is obliged to rush 
 out of it. In doing so, and emerging from the gates, you enter, unawares 
 perhaps, the Turkish suburb of Eyoub, famous for the mosque in which all the 
 ■descendants of Mahomet gird them with the sword. If you dare approach that 
 mosque, you will be stoned. You must sneak through the bye-lanes around, 
 and steal a furtive peep. Curiosity more indiscreet might cost you your life." 
 — The Greek and the Turk, pp. 183 — 9. 
 
 The Rev. Horatio Southgate thus describes what he himself wit- 
 nessed in the streets of Constantinople long after the pretended 
 •*' Reform " had commenced : — 
 
 "On the morning of the paschal, after the public prayer was ended, it 
 t>elonged to the soldiers to carry back the mats which had served them in their 
 devotions, to the place whence they were taken. Instead, however, of per- 
 forming the labour themselves, they dispersed through the crowds, and singling 
 out the rayahs who happened to be there, compelled them to take the mats 
 iipon their shoulders and bear them. I saw one Armenian seized. He was a 
 young man of respectable appearance, and refused when arrested to perform
 
 17 
 
 the scandalous task. Immediately some twenty soldiers set upon him, and 
 attempted to beat him into submission. He resisted manfully for a few 
 minutes, while they, standing in a circle round him, kicked him from side to 
 side, like a football. He offered to hire a porter to carry the burden, but they 
 persisted in imposing the contumely upon him, and he walked away under his 
 burden, sobbing with shame and vexation. We know that the insult was forced 
 upon him because he was a Christian. I witnessed other scenes of a similar 
 kind during the following days of the festival. They filled me with the deepest 
 indignation, but the oppression of rayahs became afterwards so familiar a S'ght 
 to me, that the first efiects gradually ceased. It is only now, when looking 
 back on those scenes from the favoured home of Christianity, that I feel a 
 return of the first glow of indignation, and mourn, as I then sincerely mourned, 
 oTer the desolate heritage of Zion in the land where she held her earliest and 
 broadest sway." — Travels in Turkey and Persia, by Rev. Horatio Southgate, 
 vol. i., pp. 113— 14. 
 
 The Author of " Eothen" observed the same thing of Damascus. 
 
 "Until about a year or two years before the time of my going there, 
 Damascus had kept up so much of the old bigot zeal against Christians, or 
 rather against Europeans, that no one dressed as a Frank could have dared to 
 show himself in the streets ; but the firmness and temper of Mr. Farren, who 
 hoisted his flag in the city as Consul-General for the district, had soon put an 
 end to all intolerance of Englishmen. . . . In the principal streets there 
 is a path for foot-passengers raised a foot or two above the bridle-road. Until 
 the arrival of the British Consul-General, none but a Mussulman had been 
 allowed to walk upon the upper way. Mr. Farren would not, of course, suffer 
 that the humiliation of any such exclusion should be submitted to by an 
 Englishman, and I always walked on the raised path as free and unmolested 
 as if I had been in Pall Mall. The old usage was, however, maintained with 
 as much strictness as ever against the Christian rayahs and Jews. Not one of 
 these could have set his foot on the privileged path without endangering his 
 life. I was walking one day, I remember, along the raised path, ' the path of 
 the faithful,' when a Christian rayah from the bridle-road below saluted me 
 with such earnestness, and craved so anxiously to speak and be spoken to, that 
 he soon brought me to a halt. He had nothing to tell except only the glory 
 and exaltation with which he saw a fellow-Christian stand level with the 
 imperious Mussulmans. . . . His lips only whispered, and that tremulously, 
 but his flashing eyes spoke out their triumph more fiercely : * I, too, am a 
 Christian ; my foes are the foes of the Enghsh. We are all one people, and 
 Christ is our King." — Eothen, p. 238. 
 
 Dr. Aiton gives his own experience on this point : 
 "There are three Christians to every Mohammedan in Turkey in Europe. 
 In these circumstances, is it not a strange sight to see this country fighting in 
 the year 1853 for the maintenance of Mohammedanism in Europe ?— the 
 religion of a false prophet — a religion which perpetuates error, slavery, and 
 misery. Much has been said of late as to the extreme toleration of the Turkish 
 authorities and people as to those who differ from them in their religious belief, 
 and also as to their enlightened liberality in Free Trade ; and certainly facts 
 can be adduced in support of their boasting averments striking enough, 
 B
 
 i8 
 
 especially respecting visitors to the garden of Gethsemane, and other places 
 about Jerusalem ; but still it is evident that this feeling is of late and rapid 
 growth, and that it arises more from a consciousness on the part of the Sultan 
 and his Ministers of their dependence on the protection of Christian States 
 than from any inherent principles of their religion or civil polity ; and it is also 
 to be feared, if their present difficulties or dangers were removed, that they 
 would relapse into the barbarities and intolerances of former times. In the 
 large cities, such as Smyrna and Constantinople, the Christians enjoy a certain 
 amount of protection from the surveillance which is usually exercised over 
 them ; but in the ??tain streets of these cities fifty times have the Mussulmans spit 
 at us, merely because we were Nazarenes ; and in Palestine and other remote 
 provinces we enjoyed the distinction of being stoned and hooted by a rabble of 
 Mohammedans at our heels, merely because we were * Haji,' i.e., pilgrims." — 
 The Drying up of the Euphrates, p. 64. 
 
 Similar is Miss Martineau's records of her own experience : — 
 
 " At Nablous the bigotry of the people is so great that till of late years no 
 Christian was permitted to set foot within the gates. Ibrahim Pasha punished 
 the place severely, and made the people so desperately afraid of him that they 
 observed his commands pretty much as if he had power in Syria still. One of 
 his commands was, that Christians should not be ill-treated ; so we entered 
 Nablous, and rode through it to our encampment on the other side. During 
 our passage I had three slaps in the face from millet-stalks and other things 
 throwji at me ; and whichever way we looked the people were grinning, thrusting 
 out their tongues, and pretendittg to spit.^^ — Eastern Life, Present and Fast, 
 p. 529- 
 
 Who does not remember the affecting accounts given by Mr. 
 Layard of the horrible and wholesale massacre of the Nestorian 
 Christians by the Kurds, only a short time before his visit to that 
 region ? And whether this and similar acts are committed with the 
 connivance of the Turkish Government, or whether they are powerless 
 to restrain the fanaticism of their own subjects, it amounts practically 
 very much to the same thing. A government that is too impotent 
 either to prevent or to punish outrages so gross and revolting upon a 
 whole community of innocent Christian people, is almost as great a 
 curse as if it were itself an active agent in the persecution. 
 
 ** It was near Lizan," says Mr. Layard, "that occurred one of the most 
 terrible incidents of the massacre, an and active mountaineer offering to lead 
 me to the spot, I followed him up the mountain. Emerging from the gardens, 
 we found ourselves at the foot of an almost perpendicular detritus of loose 
 stones, terminated, about one thousand feet above us, by a wall of lofty rocks. 
 Up this ascent we ^toiled for above an hour, sometimes clinging to small 
 shrubs, whose roots scarcely reached the scanty soil below, at others crawling 
 on our hands and knees ; crossing the gullies to secure a footing, or carried 
 down by the stones which we put in motion as we advanced, Ife soon 
 saw evidences of the slaughter. At first a solitary skull rolling down with the 
 rubbish ; then heaps of blanched bodies, further up fragments of rotten garments.
 
 19 
 
 As we advanced^ these remains became jfiore frequent — skeletons, almost entire, 
 still hung to the dzoarf shrubs. I was soon compelled to renounce an atte77ipt to 
 count them. As we approached the wall of rock, the declivity became covered 
 with bones, mingled with the long plaited tresses of the women, shreds of dis- 
 colowed linen and well-worn shoes. There were skulls of all ages, frotri the child 
 U7iborn to the toothless old man. We could not avoid treading on the bones 
 as we advanced, and rolling them with the loose stones into the valley below. 
 'This is nothing,' exclaimed my guide, who observed me gazing with 
 wonder on these miserable heaps ; ' they are but the remains of those who 
 were throwm from above, or sought to escape the sword by jumping from the 
 xock.%.'' ''"'^Researches in Nineveh, vol. i. 
 
 But Mr. Layard, after narrating these events, led his readers to 
 hope that they were done without the cognizance of the Government, 
 and that when known, the wrongs of the Nestorian Christians would 
 be amply redressed. We believe that he himself represented the 
 matter to the Porte, whose promises, as usual, were prompt and 
 plausible. Officers were sent professedly to inquire into and to 
 punish the atrocities, and to take the Christians under the paternal 
 protection of the Sultan. Well, Mr. Layard paid a second visit to the 
 same region, and this is the description he gives of how the persecuted 
 Nestorians fared under the shadow of their Turkish protectors : — 
 
 "Their church was in ruins — around were the charred remains of the 
 burnt cottages, and the neglected orchards overgrown with weeds. A body 
 of Turkish troops had lately visited the village, and had destroyed the little 
 that had been restored since the Kurdish invasion. The same taxes had been 
 collected three times — and even four times over. The relations of those who 
 had run away to escape from these exactions had been compelled to pay for 
 the fugitives. The chief had been thrown, with his arms tied behind his back, 
 on a heap of burning straw, and compelled to disclose where a little money that 
 had been saved by the villagers had been buried. The priest had been torn from 
 the altar, a^id beaten before his congregation. Men showed me the marks of 
 torture on their body, and of iron fetters round their limbs. For the sake of 
 wringing a few piastres from this poverty-stricken people, all these deeds of 
 violence had been conunitted by officers sent by the Porte to protect the Christian 
 subjects of the Sultan, whom they pretended to have released from the misrule of 
 the Kurdish chiefs.''^ 
 
 Take another passage from the same work : — 
 
 "The Nestorian community had greater wrongs to complain of than their 
 Patriarch. The Turkish Government, so far from fulfilling the pledges given to 
 the British embassy, had sent officers to the mountains, who had grievously ill- 
 treated and oppressed the Christian '^inhabitants. The taxes which the Porte 
 had promised to remit for three years, in consideration of the losses sustained 
 by the unfortunate Nestorians during the massacres, had not been, it is true, 
 levied for that time, but had now been collected altogether, whole districts 
 being thus reduced to the greatest misery and want. Every manner of 
 cruelty and torture had been used to compel the suffering Christians to yield 
 up the httle property they had concealed from the rapacity of the Turkish
 
 20 
 
 authorities. The pasture and arable lands around their villages had been 
 taken away from them and given to their Kurdish tyrants." 
 
 One other witness we shall cite on this part of our subject. Mac- 
 farlane, in the Appendix to his volume, gives in detail the facts of 
 that terrible persecution of the Christians, which he describes in 
 general terms in the following extract : — 
 
 ** I have said elsewhere, and I must here repeat, that Lord Stratford de 
 Redcliffe has been singularly unfortunate in his efforts to protect the Christian 
 element of the population, and to induce the Turks to practise consistently 
 that perfect religious toleration, the merits of which have been so frequently 
 and so loudly claimed by and for Reschid and his partisans. His Lord- 
 ship (then Sir Stratford) obtained in 1845 a decree full of religious 
 coleration. Every Christian rayah was to have full liberty of conscience and 
 of worship. Those who were Christians in disguise were to declare them- 
 selves, and to resort without fear or restraint to their own places of worship. 
 This fine decree led immediately to one of the most frightful of religious 
 persecutions — to multiplied murders, to massacres, to execrable tortures, to 
 expatriation, famine, disease, and nearly every horror that can afflict 
 humanity. And this persecution was not the act of a tumultuary mob — was 
 not the effect of a sudden uncontrollable outburst of popular fanaticism — no, 
 it was the act of the Government ; it was directed by pashas, mudirs, and 
 mufties ; and to the Government the onus and odium must attach for ever. 
 / sazu the surviving victims, I verified all the facts and circumstances, and I 
 was most intimately acquainted with the Frank Christians who nobly exerted 
 themselves to put a stop to these Turkish atrocities. I could well enter into 
 the feelings of our Brusa consul and my old friend Donald Sandison when he 
 went to remonstrate with the bloated pasha, who, as usual, received him 
 seated in state on his divan, or broad sofa. After some brief compliment, 
 Mustapha Nouree motioned the consul to take a seat at his side. * No,' 
 said Donald, with the spirit of a true Highlander ; ' No ! I will not sit there ! 
 your divan is steeped in blood ! you are reeking with the blood of Christians. ' " 
 — Doom of Turkey, p. 224. 
 
 The Moral and Social Condition of Turkey. 
 
 As to the moral and social condition of the Turks, it is such that 
 we can scarcely dare allude to it. By the combined influence of 
 slavery and polygamy their depravity and degradation are unutterable 
 and inconceivable. "These two hellish practices," says Miss 
 Martineau, speaking from what she saw in Egypt, "which, as 
 practices, can clearly never be separated, are here avowedly con- 
 nected ; and in that connection are exalted into a double institution, 
 whose working is such as to make one almost wish that the Nile 
 would rise to cover the tops of the hills and sweep away the whole 
 abomination." We hardly know whether we ought to give the follow- 
 ing quotation from Mr. Crowe's work ; and yet while some of our 
 countrymen are allowing themselves to be deceived by declamations
 
 21 
 
 about the noble character of the Turk, and the marvellous improve- 
 ments going on in Turkey, we do not feel that we are at liberty 
 to suppress it. As for England taking such a people under its special 
 patronage and protection, we believe the thing would not be tolerated 
 for a moment but for the profound ignorance which prevails as to 
 their habits and condition. 
 
 ** The question that naturally arises here is, What becomes of the female 
 progeny of the poor in Constantinople ? To this one is sorry to have to 
 reply that the very poor in Constantinople have no progeny, because they can 
 have no women. We know not exactly the number of females in the Turkish 
 capital, which makes up a population of seven or eight hundred thousand ; 
 but the number, whatever it is, is very unfairly and unnaturally divided ; for 
 whilst the harem of the rich teems with women, there are none in the lowest 
 classes of the population, and but few even in the class above it. A wife is 
 expensive in any country, but in Turkey more than anywhere else, inasmuch 
 as a Turkish wife is not fit for or capable of labour of any kind. She could 
 not sweep a room, she durst not go to market. She must have a slave to 
 perform those menial offices. And there is besides the expense of decorating, 
 covering, and immuring a wife — another necessity of Mohammedanism. No 
 labouring man, then — not even an artisan — can afford a wife. What is the 
 consequence ? Concubinage ? But there are no women. I will not pursue 
 this subject into any more of its horrid developments, further than to observe 
 that the lower orders of a Turkish city do not reproduce their kind— they 
 die out on dunghills.'' — The Greek and the Turk, pp. 208 — 9. 
 
 Under such arrangements as these, the Turkish population is 
 slowly but certainly diminishing. And to hasten on the process, we 
 are told that among the higher classes infanticide is a common 
 practice. Thackeray, describing what he saw at the Mausoleum of 
 the late Sultan Mahmoud's family in Constantinople, has this passage, 
 relating to a fact which is notorious enough, and which serves to 
 illustrate a custom equally notorious, which has prevailed for centuries 
 and still prevails, in " the liberal and enlightened Government of the 
 Porte." 
 
 "In this dismal but splendid museum I remarked two little tombs, with 
 little red fezzes, very small and for very young heads evidently, which were 
 lying under the little embroidered palls of state ; I forget whether they had 
 candles too ; but their little flame of life was soon extinguished, and there 
 was no need of many pounds of wax to typify it. These were the tombs of 
 Mahmoud's grandsons, nephews of the present light of the universe, and 
 children of his sister, the wife of Halil Pacha. Little children die in all ways ; 
 those of the ' much maligned ' Mahomedan royal race perish by the bow- 
 string. Sultan Mahmoud (may he rest in glory 1) strangled the one; but, 
 having some spark of human feeling, was so moved by the wretchedness and 
 agony of the poor bereaved mother, his daughter, that his royal heart relented 
 towards her, and he promised that should she ever have another child it should 
 be allowed to live. He died, and Abdul Medjid (may his name be blessed !),
 
 22 
 
 the debauched young man whom we just saw riding to the mosque, succeeded. 
 This sister, whom he is said to have loved, became again a mother, and had a 
 son ; but she rehed upon her father's word and her august brother's love, and 
 hoped that this little one should be spared. The same accursed hand tore this 
 infant out of its mother's bosom and killed it. The poor woman's heart broke 
 outright : at this second calamity she died. But on her death-bed she sent for 
 her brother, rebuked him as a perjurer and an assassin, and expired, calling 
 down the Divine justice on his head. She lies now by the side of the two little 
 fezzes : — 
 
 "After the murder of that little child, it seems to me one can never look 
 with anything but horror upon the butcherly Herod who ordered it. The 
 death of the seventy thousand Janissaries ascends to historic dignity, and takes 
 rank as war. But a great prince and light of the universe, who procures 
 abortions, and throttles little babies, dwindles away into such a frightful insig- 
 nificance of crime, that those may respect him who will. I pity their excellencies 
 the ambassadors who are obliged to smirk and cringe to such a rascal." 
 
 As to the effect of such a moral and domestic system as prevails 
 among the Turks on the training of children, and the formation of 
 human character, Mr. Crowe says : — 
 
 "Thefmoral and intellectual degradation of the male, is the necessary 
 consequence of the degradation of his natural partner. The seclusion and 
 isolation of one sex, leads to the seclusion and isolation of the individuals of 
 the other. The amenities and attractions of society are gone. In camp alone 
 do men congregate, and when the Turks did so, they certainly developed and 
 retained certain of the heroic virtues, stained by the baseness and cruelty into 
 which military heroism so easily degenerates. Reared by an animal mother, 
 the Turk grows up a young animal, and no more ; with strong fighting pro- 
 pensities and strong sensual ones, and a religion which, checking none of them, 
 merely teaches that immortality was to be gained by that indulgence in lust 
 and in blood, which is the strongest of human passions. Such an animal — we 
 can scarcely dignify him by the name of man — had need of no intellectual 
 development or cultivation, and he had none." — Pp. 201 — 2. 
 
 After all this evidence we may well say, in the words of Mr. 
 M'Culloch, in his Geographical Dictiotiary : — 
 
 "Such is the Government which the great Powers of Christendom, in- 
 cluding, we are sorry to say, England, profess themselves desirous to maintain 
 in all its integrity ! We hardly, however, think that it is destined to a much 
 longer endurance ; and, happily, into whatever hands it may fall, there cannot 
 be so much as the shadow of a doubt that the overthrow of the Turkish 
 Government and power will be productive of the greatest possible advantage 
 to the interests of humanity." 
 
 But before closing what we have to say under this head, we must 
 give a few extracts from the reports of our own consuls in various 
 parts of Turkey, in 1853 — 4, at the very time when our armaments were 
 in that country, to maintain its Government.
 
 23 
 
 Consul Saunders, under date of Prevesa, April 13th, 1 85 3, writes : — 
 
 *' The rural population, oppressed by fiscal exactions, and subjected to 
 intolerable acts of violence and injustice, cannot be expected to entertain any 
 but the most rancorous feelings towards their persecutors. The inhabitants of 
 the greater part of these villages being, moreover, exclusively Christians, and 
 seeing no other prospect of relief open to them, are continually thronging the 
 foreign Consulates with a view to seek some friendly intervention." — Part i., 
 P- 378. 
 
 Vice-Consul Baratti writes, Scutari, June ist, 1853: — 
 *' All the desperate characters have raised their heads again, and acts of 
 rapine and robbery are very frequent at the expense of the Christians. Omar 
 Fasha, the Governor of this province, is a Mussulman, and sees with perfect 
 inaif^ereftce all these excesses. The Christians, who are exposed to the vengeance 
 ot their enemies, live in a continual state of alarm." — P. 379. 
 
 Consul Neale writes, Turnour, June 28th, 1853 — 
 
 That ' ' the Christian population of Bulgaria are opposed to any foreign 
 occupation," and that, "were it not for the recurrence of these wanton and cold- 
 blooded murders, and the consequent total insecurity of life, the Bulgarians 
 would ask for arms to resist an invasion of the country." — P. 381. 
 
 The following is an extract from a Proclamation of the Christian 
 subjects of the Porte in Epirus, in March, 1854 : — 
 
 "The cruel bondage under which we, the population of Grecian Epirus, 
 have laboured for upwards of four centuries, is not unknown to the Sovereigns 
 and people of Christendom. Tyrannical fury has spared neither life nor 
 property, nor left us any kind of liberty. God created us men in His own 
 image and similitude ; whereas we are treated as beasts. The temples of our 
 ancestral faith have been a thousand times impiously polluted and despoiled ; 
 the graves of our fathers opened, and their bones frequently cast into the fire ; 
 the honour of our wives and children continually outraged ; so that our breath 
 alone remains to us, and that but to augment our sufferings. Our voice 
 and language only avail us to appeal and protest against such impious acts 
 of the infidels ; latterly, since the differences on the Russo-Turkish question, 
 the oppressions towards us Christians have been multiplied. Cumulated 
 oppressions, insults, and dishonour, sacrifice of life without end, spoliation 
 upon spoliation, and all the direful woes of Hades itself, are written in our 
 book of life." — Correspondence respecting the Relations between Greece and 
 Turkey, p. 61. 
 
 Here are some further extracts from the letters of Consul Saunders, 
 March, 1854 : — 
 
 " Among other cases brought forward was one where a mother had her 
 son and daughter bound before her eyes and menaced with frightful tortures, 
 boiling oil being prepared to pour upon them for this purpose, unless a large 
 sum of money, which the family was supposed to possess, were immediately 
 consigned ; while the unfortunate mother, producing every species of valuable 
 which she could collect, was with difficulty enabled to satisfy the rapacity of
 
 24 
 
 these ruffians, who eventually decamped with a large booty. It should be 
 observed that the parties concerned in the outrages are mostly wealthy Mussul- 
 man proprietors, who scruple not to commit every species of atrocity on such 
 occasions." — P. 127. 
 
 " From the details so obtained, I learn that the town of Paramithia, and a 
 considerable number of Christian villages of that and the adjacent districts, 
 have been plundered, and in many instances burnt to the ground, by the 
 Mussulman Albanians, under the command of certain chiefs, whose names are 
 known ; that churches and monasteries have been pillaged and laid waste ; 
 women and children carried away captive ; a vast amount of cattle and 
 other property conveyed to distant parts ; and many individuals, particularly 
 old men, helpless infants, and females, tortured and slain in a manner too 
 brutal to describe." — P. 152. 
 
 In the year 1854 Sir Culling Eardley published a pamphlet,* which 
 proves that the law which dooms a Mussulman converted to Chris- 
 tianity to summary death, was in force at that very time in Turkey, 
 whatever professions and promises may have been made to the con- 
 trary. " I beheve it to be a fact of history," says Sir Culling, " that a 
 Mussulman, who avowed himself a believer in Christ at Adrianople, 
 was actually put to death in 1853." Well may he add, "It is an 
 odious and unchristian inconsistency, that while Christendom is sus- 
 taining the Government of Turkey, the Government of Turkey should 
 be suffered to decapitate Mussulmen for becoming Christians." " We 
 cannot conceal from ourselves the fact," says the Rev. G. Fisch, a 
 Protestant pastor at Lyons, " that this perfidious system of persecu- 
 tion, which only gives a Mussulman who has become a Christian three 
 days to prepare for death, is marvellously calculated to paralyse all 
 
 missionary effort What more strange than to see the Turkish 
 
 empire, vanquished by our civilisation, and obliged to lean on us in 
 its decay, and yet at the same time making that very Christianity 
 A^hicti prevents its downfall a capital crime in any Mussulman who 
 embraces it." Well might Lord Carlisle say, " that some plausible 
 and even some substantial grounds might be alleged for the proposi- 
 tions of Prince Menschikoff, for," adds his lordship, " I DO NOT 
 THINK IT WELL FOR ANY CHRISTIAN STATE TO LEAVE ITS CO- 
 RELIGIONISTS TO THE UNCOVENANTED FORBEARANCE OF MUSSUL- 
 MAN RULERS." 
 
 State of Turkey since the Crimean War. 
 
 Such was the state of things at the time of the Crimean War. 
 That war was expected by sanguine people to be a great turning- 
 point in the history of Turkey. Closer intercourse with the Western 
 nations was to mitigate, if not to remove, the old Mohammedan pre- 
 
 * " Christianity in Turkey," pp, 39 — 44,
 
 25 
 
 judices. Gratitude for the services rendered to them in their extreme 
 need was to dispose the Turks to Hsten with favour to all the sugges- 
 tions that might come from their allies for internal reforms in their 
 administration, and especially for a more lenient treatment of their 
 Christian fellow-subjects. The country was to be regenerated by an 
 infusion of the elements of Western civilisation. To this end Turkey 
 was admitted, for the first time, into the concert of European nations. 
 England and France became sponsors for its financial solvency. The 
 firman elicited from the Sultan at the time of the Treaty of 1856 was 
 proclaimed as the Magna Charta of Turkish freedom. 
 
 It now remains to be seen how far these hopes have been realised. 
 And first let us see what was going on at the very time when Christian 
 Europe was fighting the battles of Turkey. 
 
 Here is a description, by an eye-witness, of the way in which the 
 Turks treated our poor wounded soldiers, who had been shedding 
 their blood to maintain the independence and integrity of the Ottoman 
 empire. It is from a little book entitled "Experiences of an English 
 Sister of Mercy," published in 1863 : — 
 
 "Having access to windows commanding two wharves, we often saw the 
 sick and wounded from Balaclava brought on shore. This was indeed a piteous 
 spectacle — a long file of stretchers, each with a gaunt soldier, clothed in his 
 tattered grey coat, lying helpless (and very often senseless) upon it, being 
 borne by noisy, careless Turks, who really appeared to resort to little expe- 
 dients in order to increase the sufferings of the soldier ; such as placing the 
 taller of the four bearers at the feet rather than the head ; when about to rest, 
 allowing the framework to fall with a jerk ; or lifting it up unevenly, and thus 
 rolling off the bleeding burden. On one occasion a wounded man was;brought 
 in, and two of the bearers had rested their poles on the ground while the 
 other two still retained theirs, thus causing the patient to lie on his head and 
 shoulders. On releasing him we found that he had fainted : a few moments 
 longer would probably have placed him beyond recovery. On another occasion 
 the Turkish bearers, while jesting among themselves, threw a sick man off the 
 stretcher, cutting his face, and giving him a severe shock. "When able to 
 speak, his first words were, 'Those frightful men have murdered me.' He 
 did not live long after, though the fall would not have killed a man in 
 health." 
 
 No wonder that a distinguished officer in the Crimea, writing home 
 in 1854, should have said : — 
 
 " Half of us do not know what we are fighting for, and the other half only 
 pray that we may not be fighting for the Turks." — Bnghi^s Speeches, vol. i., 
 p. 473. 
 
 To the same effect is the testimony of Mrs. Hornby in letters 
 written from Constantinople in 1856, and published in a work entitled 
 " In and about Stamboul," as to the feelings of the Turks towards 
 their Christian allies after the war was over : —
 
 26 
 
 **It is very dispiriting to discover what a people these really are after all 
 they have cost us. As to gratitude, they detest us all the more for the 
 humiliation of obligation. It is all very fine to talk of ' alliance ' in the news- 
 papers, or at public dinners, champagne in hand, and with the Crescent and 
 Cross twining affectionately round the English standard and the lilies of 
 France. Depend upon it that only from the most dire necessity will they 
 ever tolerate our interference, and that east and west are not so far divided 
 as our tastes, habits, and every natural tendency." 
 
 How was the expectation fulfilled that the Crimean War would 
 soften the prejudices of the Moslems against the Christians, and so 
 open the way for the spread of Christianity in Turkey ? Mr. Righter, 
 secretary of the Turkish branch of the Evangelical Alliance at Con- 
 stantinople, writing home towards the end of 1856, says : — 
 
 "Now that the foreign troops have been withdrawn, foreign influence 
 seems in a great measure to have declined at the capital, and has entirely 
 ceased in the interior. The hatti-sherij^ has aroused the bigoted prejudices of 
 the Mussulmans. Violent persecutions have been excited against Protestants 
 both by the Christian sects and Moslems, and there is no protection nor 
 redress. Several aggravated cases have recently been brought before our 
 notice. We have appealed again and again to the European ambassadors, 
 who have interested themselves warmly in the matter, but have been unable 
 to procure any relief to persecuted persons who have been imprisoned or 
 banished." 
 
 Dr. Sandwith, in his volume entitled, " Siege of Kars," after 
 referring to a firman published in 1854, promising legal equality before 
 the courts to the Christians, says : — 
 
 *' Since then I have been nearly two years in the provinces, both in 
 European and Asiatic Turkey, and have seen Christians frequently wronged, 
 but have never heard of their evidence being taken. Each pasha, when 
 questioned concerning this firman, declares he knows nothing of it, no firman 
 of the kind has ever been officially communicated to him ; he must act 
 according to his instructions, he cannot take cognisance of firmans conveyed 
 through European consuls." — Pp. 165 — 7. 
 
 As an example of the way in which the feelings of the Sultan's 
 Christian subjects were rudely trampled on by Mussulman intolerance, 
 he gives the following faithful translation of a teskerd, or permit of 
 burial, given by the Cadi of Mardin in the spring of 1855 to a 
 Christian applying for it. He has given and does give, adds Dr. 
 Sandwith, scores of the like kind to all the giaours in his juris- 
 diction. 
 
 " We certify to the priests of the Church of Mary, that the impure, 
 putrified, stinking carcase of Saideh, damned this day, may be concealed under 
 ground. (Sealed) 
 
 " El Said Mehurred Faizi. 
 "A. H. 1271.— Rejib." 
 (March 29th, 1855.)
 
 27 
 
 One of the first travellers who visited Turkey after the war of 
 1854 — 5 was Mr. Nassau W. Senior. He published the result of his 
 observations in a work entitled, " A Journal kept in Turkey and 
 Greece in the Autumn of 1857 and the Beginning of 1858." 
 
 Before citing some extracts from Mr. Senior's book, we will present 
 to our readers the following summary of its contents from the 
 Edinburgh Review of October, 1859 : — 
 
 "Mr. Senior's journey to the East was made at a time peculiarly 
 calculated to give interest and value to his observations. The war was just 
 over, in which the armed intervention of the Western Powers had rescued 
 Turkey from the impending peril of Russian invasion. A peace had been 
 signed, which had guaranteed the independence and integrity of the Ottoman 
 dominions, and placed the Sultan within the common security afforded by the 
 public law of Europe. Large concessions, conceived in a tolerant and liberal 
 spirit, had been made to the Christian population by the hatti-i-humayoon of 
 February, 1856. Attempts were not wanting to place the Turkish finances 
 on a better footing — to raise loans — to develop the resources of the country, 
 and to carry on the work of Reform. If ever there was a moment in modern 
 times when hopes of the regeneration of Turkey could reasonably be enter- 
 tained after the efforts and sacrifices Europe had made in her behalf, the 
 autumn of 1857 was that time. Yet the evidence Mr. Senior has collected, and 
 the picture he has drawn, can leave no illusion on the mind of any man who 
 believes the one to be true and the other to be correct. We might quote page 
 after page to demonstrate that all our exertions had only served to rescue the 
 most execrable and contemptible Government in Europe from an external 
 danger, without adding anything to its internal strength or vitality. The fourth 
 point of the articles relating to Turkey in the Treaty of Paris, which was 
 to secure to the Christian subjects of the Porte equality of civil and religious 
 rights in exchange for the guarantee extended to the dominions of the Sultan 
 by the Christian Powers, has remained a dead letter. The condition of the 
 Christian population is in truth unchanged, and nothing has occurred to lessen 
 their ineradicable distrust and hatred of their Mussulman rulers. Turkey in 
 fact exists, as an English merchant settled at Galata observed to Mr. Senior, 
 for two purposes : — First, to act as dog in the manger, and to prevent 
 any Christian Power from possessing a country which she herself, in her 
 present state, is unable to govern or protect ; and, secondly, [for the benefit 
 of some fifty or sixty bankers and usurers, and some thirty or forty pashas, 
 who make fortunes out of its spoils." 
 
 It is necessary to explain that Mr. Senior, instead of giving his 
 own opinions on the state of things in Turkey, has adopted the plan 
 of recording the conversation of a large number of intelligent persons, 
 principally Europeans who had been long resident in the country, 
 and had enjoyed ample opportunities of forming a judgment upon the 
 matters of which they spoke. In the Preface he says, that "while the 
 reader will find on many points great difference of opinion ; on a few, 
 such as the rapid decline of the Ottoman empire in wealth and in 
 population, the corruption of its officials, and the mischief done to it
 
 •2B 
 
 by diplomatic interference, he will find nearly unanimity." We shall 
 therefore confine our extracts principally to those points on which 
 such remarkable unanimity prevails among all the witnesses, Turks, 
 Armenians, British, French, Germans, and Russians. Here is one 
 specimen : — 
 
 "'What impression does the East produce on you?' said one gentleman 
 to me. 
 
 '* ' I have had time,' I said, 'only to look at the exterior. I see a capital, 
 the streets of which are impassible to wheels, and scarcely to be traversed on 
 foot ; I see a country without a road ; I see a palace of the Sultan's on every 
 promontory of the Bosphorus ; I see vast tracts of unoccupied land, and more 
 dogs than human beings ; these appearances are not favourable to the Govern- 
 ment or the people.' 
 
 ** * If you have the misfortune,' he answered, ' as I have had, to live among 
 Turks for between two and three years, your opinions will be still less favour- 
 able. In government and religion Turkey is a detritus. All that gave her 
 strength, all that gave her consistency, is gone ; what remains is crumbling 
 into powder. The worst parts of her detestable religion — hatred of improve- 
 ment and hatred of the unbeliever ; the worst parts of her detestable govern- 
 ment — violence, extortion, treacheiy, and fraud — are all that she has retained. 
 Never was there a country that more required to be conquered. Our support 
 merely delays her submission to that violent remedy.' 
 
 " ' You think, then,' I said, 'that it must come to that?' 
 
 " 'I can see,' he answered, 'no other solution; the Turk is utterly un- 
 improvable. He hates change, and therefore he hates civilisation ; he hates 
 Europeans, he hates and fears all that they propose. There is not a word in 
 the hatti-i-humayoon that does not disgust, or irritate, or alarm him. Nothing 
 but force will oblige him to give it even the appearance of execution. And 
 what is the value of apparent reforms in a people without an aristocracy, 
 without a middle class, without a public opinion, without the means of com- 
 munication, without newspapers, without even a post-office; accustomed for 
 four hundred years to plunder and oppress rayahs, and to be oppressed and 
 plundered by sultans, pashas, cadis, and janissaries?'" — Pp. 27 — 8. 
 
 In a conversation with another gentleman Mr. Senior asked : — 
 
 " ' Is not the hatti-i-humayoon a real reform ?' 
 
 " ' It is waste paper,' he answered. ' So far from acting on it, the Turks 
 
 cannot even understand it It is a year-and-a-half old. You 
 
 cannot point out a single clause to which any effect has been given. ' 
 
 " ' In time,' I said, ' some fruit will come.' 
 
 " 'No fruit,' said G. H., 'has come of the hatti-sheriff of Gul Haneh, of 
 which the hatti-i-humayoon is little more than a paraphrase. Unless England 
 and France unite to force real reforms on Turkey, I fear we have only delayed 
 her subjugation by Russia.' " — P. 44. 
 
 Of the condition of the Christians, another speaker says : — 
 " You see nothing here [at Constantinople] of Turkish rule. Here they 
 are restrained by European opinion ; but in the remoter districts, where there 
 is no consul to interfere, the Christians, unless they are numerous enough and
 
 29 
 
 bold enoufrh to defend themselves, are treated not merely as slaves, but as 
 slaves whom their masters hate. You may fancy what such a slavery is when 
 the master is a barbarian." 
 
 Further on we find this testimony from a fourth witness : — 
 " He gave a frightful account of the misgovernment of Turkish Armenia. 
 . . . . The amount of tyranny may be inferred from the depopulation. 
 You see vast districts without an inhabitant, in which are the traces of a large 
 and a civilised people, great works for irrigation now in ruins, and constant 
 remains of deserted towns. There is a city near the frontier, with high walls 
 and large stone houses, now absolutely uninhabited ; it had once sixty thousand 
 inhabitants."— Pp. 838—9. 
 
 Again, Mr. Senior himself says : — 
 
 "I do not believe that the Turks are more idle, wasteful, improvident, and 
 brutal now than they were four hundred years ago. But it is only within the 
 last fifty years that the effects of these qualities have shown themselves fully. 
 When they first swarmed over Asia Minor, Roumelia, and Bulgaria, they 
 seized on a country very populous and of enormous wealth. For three hundred 
 and fifty years they kept on consuming that wealth, and wearing out that 
 population. If a Turk wanted a house or a garden, he turned out a rayah ; if 
 he wanted money, he put a bullet into a handkerchief, tied it into a knot, and 
 sent it to the nearest opulent Greek or Armenian. At last, having lived for 
 three centuries and a half on their capital of things and of man, having reduced 
 that rich and well-peopled country to the desert which you now see it, they 
 find themselves poor. They cannot dig, to beg they are ashamed. They use 
 the most mischievous means to prevent large families ; they kill their female 
 children, the conscription takes off the males, and they disappear. The only 
 memorial of what fifty years ago was a popular Turkish village is a crowded 
 burial-ground now unused. 
 
 " As a medical man," said Y., " I, and perhaps /only, know what crimes 
 are committed in the Turkish part of Smyrna, which looks so gay and smiling, 
 as its picturesque houses, embosomed in gardens of planes and cypresses, rise 
 up the hill. I avoid as much as I can the Turkish houses, that I may not be 
 cognizant of them. Sometimes it is a young second wife who is poisoned by 
 the older one ; sometimes a female child, whom the father will not bring up ; 
 sometimes a male killed by the mother to spite the father. Infanticide is 
 rather the rule than the exception. No inquiry is made, no notice is taken by 
 the police." — Pp. 211 — 12. 
 
 A friend well acquainted with the whole of Turkey said to Mr. Senior as 
 he was leaving Constantinople, "You are going to Smyrna and to Greece. 
 When you are at Smyrna visit Ephesus ; you will ride through fifty miles of 
 the most fertile soil, blest with the finest climate in the world. You will not 
 see an inhabitant nor a cultivated field. This is Turkey. In Greece or in the 
 Principalities you will find comparative numbers, wealth and population. They 
 have been msigoverned ; they have been the seat of war ; but they have thrown 
 off the Turk."— P. 148. 
 
 The moral condition of Turkey is still indescribable. There is 
 abundant evidence of a /earful kind, but it cannot be publicly pro-
 
 30 
 
 duced. The following letter addressed to the Rev. Earnest Hawkins, 
 8th January, 1863, and which is in the archives of the Society for the 
 Propagation of the Gospel, indicates what cannot be described : — 
 
 " Few of you in England know the real horrors of this country. You will 
 see what I mean when I tell you my intention of getting a number of tracts in 
 Turkish written or lithographed, to be distributed by a Turk on the bridges, 
 &c. The tract is to consist of such passages as the history of Sodom and 
 Gomorrah. What can we hope to do with this people ? One Englishman, 
 who has to|do with multitudes of them, reckons those who are innocent of this 
 hideous vice at one or two in a hundred. A Turkish teacher told an European 
 that those who are guiltless as to that are two in a thousand. 
 
 ** Stories of assault sub dio, effected or attempted, have come to me one 
 after another. These people must be held together? What is our policy 
 supporting? Some one asked me how to account for this in a people the 
 most moral of all — the English people — that these deepest immoralities should 
 be maintained by their patronage ? I replied, they are for the most part quite 
 ignorant or unwilling to believe what they hear. Still, it is a condition of 
 morals which makes khans, and baths, and lonely places dangerous to the 
 unwary. . . . 
 
 " Believe me (my authority is the best) it is a question of time ; the decay 
 of the Turkish people is going on rapidly ; their numbers are fast decreasing 
 through vice, disease, neglect, and the conscription." 
 
 The Rev. William Denton in his work, ''The Christians of Turkey," 
 after referring to the practice of polygamy, infanticide, and the military 
 conscription, as accounting in part for the notorious dechne of the 
 Turkish race, goes on to say : — 
 
 "But all these combined will not fully account for the fact that the 
 Turks are rapidly becoming extinct. . . . The evil lies far deeper. It is one, 
 however, which cannot be laid bare. The hideous, revolting profligacy of all 
 classes, and almost every individual in every class, is the main cause of the 
 diminution. This is a canker which has eaten into the very vitals of society. 
 It is one, however, which has taken so loathsome a form that no pen dares 
 describe the immoral state of Turkish society. It must be abandoned to vague 
 generalities, for happily the imagination cannot picture the abominations which 
 are fast exterminating the whole Turkish race. ... I have the evidence now 
 before me of persons at present resident in Turkey, as well as of English 
 officers high in the civil service, whose duties have made them acquainted with 
 the real state of society in Turkey; and in addition to these, I have a 
 voluminous report addressed to me by a distinguished foreigner, formerly a 
 colonel in the Turkish service, and, from the varied offices he has filled in that 
 country, of all men one of the most competent witnesses. I have all this 
 evidence before me, but it is so disgusting and obscene that I dare not make 
 use of it. The satires of Juvenal and Petronius Arbiter are decorous in 
 comparison. Students may remember how rabbinical writers describe the sins 
 of the Ammonites and other inhabitants of the land of Canaan, who for their 
 revoking sins were driven out by the children of Israel. That description 
 gives but a partial picture of what is the present state of Turkish society. The
 
 31 
 
 Cities of the Plain were destroyed for sins which are the common, normal, 
 every-day practice of this people."— Pp. 62—4. 
 
 The Events in Damascus and the Lebanon in i860. 
 
 It was not long after the peace of 1856 before Europe and the 
 Christian world were furnished with a terrible practical commentary 
 on the hatti-i-haimaioun, in which the Sultan " recorded his generous 
 intentions " towards the Christian population of his empire. 
 
 In the year i860 the Russian Government called the attention of 
 the great Powers concerned with itself in the Treaty of 1856 to the 
 alarming condition of the Christian provinces subject to the Porte. 
 Prince Gortschakofif, in a circular note dated April 23rd, i860, states 
 that unless some means were taken to induce the Turkish executive to 
 exert its authority for the repression of disorder and for the protection 
 of the Christians, some terrible explosion would be inevitable before 
 long. But the policy of suspicion was then in the ascendant. The 
 warning was pooh ! poohed ! as the mere offspring of Russian 
 intrigue. But in the following July the explosion did indeed take 
 place in the fearful atrocities in Syria, by which a hundred and fifty 
 towns and villages were destroyed, ten thousand people were mas- 
 sacred, seventy thousand reduced to starvation, and property destroyed 
 or plundered to the estimated value of four or five millions sterling. 
 The Druses were the immediate agents in the w^ork of horror, but 
 there is the clearest evidence to prove that the Turkish officials, 
 civil and military, not only did not attempt to repress the wholesale 
 murder and pillage going on under their eyes in the Lebanon and at 
 Damascus— that not only did they connive at them openly and 
 obviously, but that they instigated and encouraged them ; nay, that 
 in some instances they were themselves the active agents in inflicting 
 on the unfortunate Christians the inexpressible horrors which filled 
 all Europe with dismay and indignation. 
 
 The terrible stor>^ was thus summarised from the Parliamentary 
 documents in a letter from Mr. William Wood, which appeared in 
 the Times of August 28, 1876. 
 
 On May 22, i860, Hasbeya, a large Christian town under Mount 
 Hermon, was attacked by the Druses. There was a considerable 
 force of Turkish troops in the place, under the command of Othman 
 Bek:— 
 
 "This man" (I quote from Mr. Graham's despatch to Lord Dufferin) 
 "on the day of the attack on Hasbeya, told the Christians that he had been 
 sent to protect them from the Druses, but that they must lay dowm their arms, 
 otherwise they would incur the displeasure of the Government. They accord- 
 ingly obeyed, believing that he would keep his word. For ' greater security ' 
 he invited them all in the Serai Palace, used as a barrack, and the men, with 
 the women and children, crowded into the building."
 
 32 
 
 The arms were sent off with a mockery of an escort, professedly 
 to Damascus, but, as seems to have been arranged, fell into the hands 
 of the Druses, 
 
 " The Christians, meanwhile, penned up in the Serai, with hardly any food 
 and water, were now in a state of great suffering. On the 5th of June they 
 began to feel great alarm, for they saw the harem of the Governor preparing to 
 depart. To the questions of the Christians as to the cause of this movement, 
 only evasive answers were given. 
 
 •* On the 6th many of the soldiers were seen leaving ; then the unfortunate 
 people, when it was too late, saw clearly how treacherously they had been 
 deceived. They rushed into the outer court and entreated to be let out. The 
 signal was given, the gates thrown open, and in rushed the Druses, armed 
 with any weapon they could seize, and then commenced an indiscriminate 
 slaughter of all the males. Some, indeed, made their way through the door 
 to the outer gate, only to be seized by the Turkish soldiery. Nor were these 
 passive only in the transaction. Many Christians whom I have examined 
 have sworn to me that they saw the soldiers themselves taking part in the 
 slaughter..; and the subsequent behaviour of these brutal troops to the women 
 was savage in the extreine. From the wounds I have seen both on the living 
 and the dead it would appear that they went to work with the most systematic 
 cruelty — ten, twelve, and fourteen deep cuts on the body of one person is not 
 unfrequent. Some of the wounds show that they were made with blunt 
 instruments. In short, everything was used which came to hand, and, 
 according to the nature of the weapon, hands and limbs were cut off, or brains 
 dashed out, or bodies mangled, 
 
 *' Of all the men in the Serai, some 40 or 50 only escaped. Women the 
 Druses did not slaughter, nor, for the most part, I believe, ill-use ; that was left 
 for Turks and Moslems to do, and they did it, 
 
 ** Little boys of four and five years old were not safe ; these would be seize d 
 from the mother and dashed on the grS^hd, or torn to pieces before her face ; 
 or, if her grasp was too tight, they would kill it on her lap, and in some cases, 
 to save further trouble, mother and child were cut down together. Many 
 women have assured me that the Turkish soldiers have taken their children one 
 leg in each hand and torn them in two." 
 
 At Sidon, on the ist of June, the Christians were attacked in 
 similar manner by the Bashi-Bazouks and other Moslems : — 
 
 " For several days the slaughter continued. No Christian outside the town 
 was in safety. If a man, or a male child, he was cut down ; if a woman, she 
 was sure to be brutally ill-used," 
 
 The same scene of treachery as at Hasbeya was repeated at Deir- 
 el-Kamar, The inhabitants, hearing of the approach of the Druses, 
 prepared to defend themselves ; but the Turkish Governor, who had 
 700 troops at hand, told them they had nothing to fear if they would 
 deliver up their arms. Accordingly the then defenceless men, women, 
 and children were all crowded together into the Serai, under his pro- 
 tection, on the night of the 20th of June : —
 
 33 
 
 **On the morning of the 2ist the Druses collected round the town. One of 
 their leaders came to the Serai and desired to speak with the Governor. A 
 conversation was carried on in a low voice by means of an interpreter, for the 
 Turk did not know Arabic. At last a question was asked to which they heard 
 the Governor give the answer ' Hepsi' ('Ab ' in Turkish) — i.e., 'all.' There- 
 upon the Druse disappeared, but in a few moments the gate was throvsTi open 
 and in rushed the fiends, cutting down and slaughtering every male, the 
 soldiers co-operating. ... I have good reason to believe, after a careful 
 comparison of all the accounts, that from i, lOO to 1,200 males actually perished 
 in that one day. ... I myself can testify that the accounts are not much 
 exaggerated. I travelled over most of the open country before the war was 
 over, and came to Deir-el-Kamar a few days after the massacre. Almost every 
 house was burnt and the streets crowded with dead bodies, most of them 
 stripped and mutilated in every possible way. My road led through the town, 
 and through some of the streets my horse could not even pass, for the bodies 
 were literally piled up. Most of those I examined had many wounds, and in 
 each case was the right hand either entirely or nearly cut off; the poor wretch, 
 in default of weapons, having instinctively raised his arm to pany the blow 
 aimed at him. I saw little children of not more than three or four years old 
 stretched on the ground, and old men with gray beards. 
 
 " The pasha reached Deir-el-Kamar the day after the slaughter : a fact 
 ' which he will ever lament and deplore as long as he lives. ' That is what he 
 says, so of course it is true. . . . Othman Bek — the same who was at 
 Hasbeya — entered Damascus a few days ago, and received the honours of a 
 conquering hero. Nothing can be more infamous than the conduct of Ahmed 
 Pasha and of all the officials." 
 
 So far Mr. Graham {Sy7-ia7i Despatches., No. 2, p. 46). 
 
 The horrible occurrences which have been detailed above were to 
 be surpassed in a few days at Damascus. The outbreak, which the 
 Governor, Ahmed Pasha, made not the least attempt to check, occurred 
 on the 9th of July. The whole Christian quarter was ruthlessly 
 plundered and burnt to the ground ; 2,000 dead bodies lay unburied 
 amid the ruins, and 20,000 houseless wanderers, whose only crime was 
 that they were followers of Christ, were left to live on charity and ask 
 for justice at the hands of Europe. The Pasha, whose first duty was 
 to have shown himself at the head of his troops and disperse the 
 robbers, kept within his palace during the whole time of the massacre 
 (he was one of the Turkish generals associated with us in the Crimean 
 War), while his troops, fresh from the shambles of Hasbeya and Deir- 
 el-Kamar, joined the Moslem mob in murdering and pillaging. 
 
 The Rev. Dr. Thomson, one of the American missionaries in 
 Syria, the well-known author of "The Land and the Book," in a 
 letter to Sir Culling Eardley appealing for help, says : — 
 
 " I have been familiar with six bloody wars in this country during the past 
 twenty-seven years, but they were mere boys' play so far as the atrocity is con- 
 cerned in comparison with this dismal butchery. I have lately read the entire 
 history of the Moslem occupation of Syria from the beginning, and there is no 
 C
 
 34 
 
 account which equals the tragedies of Rasheya, Hasbeya, Deir-el-Kamar, and 
 Damascus — not to mention other places made desolate by this ferocious war. 
 
 "All the numbers in our appeal are too low (75,000 destitute, 10,000 
 widows) ; whole districts now known to be destroyed are not included in the 
 estimates of this circular. 
 
 "Authentic accounts, official and private, from Damascus last night raised 
 the number of the slaughtered in that city to 5,000. Of course the houseless, 
 homeless victims come nearer 20,000 than 10,000 in Damascus alone." 
 
 But there is one fact connected with these events in Syria which is 
 most humiliating to Englishmen, namely, that the authors of those 
 atrocities believed that they were doing acceptable service to our 
 country by their acts. Mr. Cyril Graham, who ventured to pay a 
 visit to the mountain a few weeks after the massacres had taken place, 
 describes an interview which he had with one of the Druse chiefs, 
 whose name, he says, " is mentioned with horror by all the Christians 
 as having been the chief instigator of, and the chief actor in, the 
 massacre of the nth of June." 
 
 **He came to see me," says Mr. Graham, "at the house of the other chief, 
 and a conversation ensued, from which it appeared that they still entertained a 
 belief, in common with most of the Druses, that the English Government must 
 be extremely satisfied with what they had done, for they imagined that any 
 diminution of the number of the Christians will be acceptable to us as weakening 
 the French influence in the country." 
 
 Later Testimonies. 
 
 We will now proceed to inquire from the evidence of other trust- 
 worthy witnesses who have traversed various parts of the Ottoman 
 empire within the last fifteen years, how far the promise of reform has 
 been fulfilled. It matters not what was the character of the travellers, 
 or what was the object of their mission ; whether they visited the 
 country for curiosity and adventure, or for purposes of philanthropy, 
 or commerce, or scientific exploration, their testimony is the same on 
 this point— the deplorable condition of Turkey. 
 
 In 1863, Miss Mackenzie and Miss Irby passed through a con- 
 siderable portion of European Turkey, and have related their observa- 
 tions and experiences in the singularly interesting volume entitled 
 "Travels in the Sclavonic Provinces of Turkey-in-Europe." 
 
 This work so abounds with evidence of the oppression and general 
 misrule of the Turkish Government, that it is difficult to make a 
 selection. Early in their work they express the conviction, that " any 
 arrangement which would disencumber the thrifty and well-disposed 
 Bulgarian of the yoke of his present barbarous master would certainly 
 prove a gain to civilisation." 
 
 They thus describe the system of taxation : —
 
 35 
 
 " As for the taxation in Turkey, grievances commence at the point where 
 in other countries they are supposed to cuhninate ; so we say nothing of the 
 injustice to a population of millions that it should have no voice in the dis- 
 posal of its money. Granted that the Bulgarians be ready to give all the 
 Government calls for, and, moreover, to pay for exemption from the army — 
 that is, for being disarmed and held dowm by Mussulmans — still, the greatest 
 grievance remains, namely, the waste and iniquity wherewith the revenue is 
 raised. 
 
 ** Hitherto the taxes have been paid in kind, a method which always gives 
 the gatherer much power to extort bribes, since he can refuse to value the pre- 
 sent standing corn until half of it be spoiled. But Turkish tax-farmers do not 
 confine themselves to such dry paths of cheating. 
 
 * ' The following is an instance of what constantly occurs : — Two men 
 agreed to keep a flock between them — the one in summer on the mountains, 
 the other in \\anter on the plain. The tax-gatherer compels the first to pay for 
 the whole, promising that he will ask nothing of the other ; he then goes to 
 the second, and, with a similar promise, forces him likewise to pay for all. In 
 like manner, the Christian can be compelled to pay twice over for exemption 
 
 from the army, if the tax-gatherer declare his first receipt forged A 
 
 change of system is being introduced which will supersede payment in kind by 
 payment in money. But it is hard to see how this is to prove beneficial, without 
 such means of transport and security of communication as would enable the 
 peasant to bring his produce to market. At present, while he must sell it in 
 the neighbourhood wherein it abounds, he is taxed at the market value. 
 
 "The people declare that the oppression is now worse than before, and 
 that this is one of the many soi-disant reforms which tell well on paper, while, 
 unless followed up by other reforms, they prove actually mischievous. We 
 ourselves saw the tax-gatherer swooping down on the villages, accompanied by 
 harpy-flocks of Albanians, armed to the teeth." — Pp. 20, 21. 
 
 They cite several instances of Christians being murdered by 
 Mohammedans with perfect impunity, and then add : — 
 
 ** In this manner murders are committed every day, and so long as the 
 victims are rayahs the authorities take no notice ; but even if they did, the 
 conviction of the assassin is hopeless, for a Christian cannot give evidence 
 in criminal cases. It may be asked, Why do the Christians not resist ? In 
 the first place, they are not, like the Mohammedans, armed ; secondly, the 
 injury of a Mohammedan by a Christian, even in self-defence, or the defence of 
 another, is rigorously punished in Mussulman courts." — P. 76. 
 
 In a note the authors subjoin the following :— 
 
 " Since writing the above, we have found these and other stories related at 
 length in Mrs. Walker's "Through Macedonia to the Albanian Lakes." She 
 also says, " the Christians of Ochrida complain bitterly of the murders of their 
 co-religionists which have taken place in that neighbourhood within the last 
 three years. No less than thirty lives have been sacrificed, but in no single 
 instance have the assassins been brought to justice (page 211). An American 
 missionary told us that near Eski-Sagra, in Bulgaria, where he was stationed, 
 from seventy to one hundred Christians were killed annually by Mussulmans 
 without inquiry being made." — P. 76.
 
 36 
 
 Of Turkish tolerance take the following illustration : — 
 "There are three Sclavonic schools in Skopia ; two contain sixty 
 scholars between them, and another, which is larger, holds a hundred. The 
 Christians have built a large church apparently unmolested, for which liberty 
 they are possibly indebted to the circumstance that Skopia was at one time a 
 Consular station. 
 
 "In districts between this and Nish there are places where the Christians, 
 having received the Sultan's firman permitting them to build a church, have 
 seen it twice thrown down by the neighbouring Mussulmans, and only suc- 
 ceeded in keeping it after the expense and labour necessary to rear it a 
 third time. "—P. 140. 
 
 Nothing is more painful in this book than the revelations it gives 
 as to the state of abject terror and servility in which the unfortunate 
 Christians are held. After describing their visit to a school at the 
 Monastery of Gratchanitza, these ladies say : — 
 
 " Before leaving the schoolroom, we ventured a very earnest remonstrance 
 as to the mode in which the pupils had greeted us. At our entrance they had 
 literally fallen down at our feet, and that with a sort of grovelling action, 
 which, if not revolting, would have been ludicrous. We asked how in 
 the world they came to suppose we should wish to be thus received. 
 Their teacher answered, ' The Turks taught it us ; their dignitaries require us 
 Christians to prostrate ourselves before them.' ' But we are not Turks, and 
 for Christians to exact or permit such self-degradation is not only a shame, but 
 a sin. Have not some of you been in free Serbia, and seen how the school- 
 children behave there?' 'No, none of them,' But at these words they 
 exchanged glances, and began to cheer up a little. They invited us to come 
 into the church, and presently brought thither a man from the village who had 
 been in free Serbia. This man wore a turban, was of uncouth aspect, and 
 otherwise looked like the other rayahs, but he was far more outspoken than 
 the monks. We desired him to say if the Serbian schoolchildren prostrated 
 themselves as these did. 'Of course not,' cried he; 'but then in Serbia 
 everything is different. There they have good roads, good judges, peace, and 
 prosperity ; here there is nothing but disorder and zulum ' (Turk, violence 
 and oppression). 
 
 "Prostrations like those of the schoolchildren at Gratchanitza frequently 
 greeted us during this journey, and we cannot think that any civiHsed traveller 
 would see them with less distress than ourselves. But one's own feeling at 
 thus witnessing the degradation of fellow-creatures and fellow-Christians gives 
 but a faint idea of what is felt by the Serbs of the Principality to whom these 
 rayahs stand in the relation of brethren of race, nay, often are near of kin. 
 Monks, merchants, and emigrarits of all sorts, pass constantly from the Turkish 
 ruled districts to free Serbia, and not even the accounts which they give of their 
 position awake such indignation as the involuntary evidence of it afforded 
 by their cringing demeanour, until they learn the manners of a new land ." 
 —Pp. 232—3. 
 
 A still more distressing illustration of the state of terror in which 
 the Christians live occurred to the travellers at Novi-Bazar. They
 
 37 
 
 were lodged by the Turkish authorities in a Christian's house. In 
 order to do them especial honour, the authorities had left three 
 zapties (policemen) in the house to attend upon them. Then, they 
 proceed : — 
 
 " They were a terrible nuisance those imperious, rapacious men turned 
 loose in a rayah's dwelling ; no part of the lower house was free from their 
 presence; the women had to hide from them, and the young father of the 
 family was ordered about as their slave. We soon perceived that something 
 was amiss by the repressed cringing air of the man, and sent our dragoman to 
 say that we only wanted^ one zaptie, and would only give backsheeh to one. 
 However, the other two M-ould not stir, so all we could do was to ask the master 
 of the house into our room, and try to reassure him with kind words ; but the 
 sound of our voices caused him to shake like a leaf, and to the most in- 
 different question he would only give a whispered reply." — Pp. 303 — 4. 
 
 Anxious to obtain from this man some information as to the state 
 of the Christian community in Novi-Bazar, they instructed their 
 dragoman to ask him a few questions ; but as the zapties were sitting 
 in a room just below, the man was in agonies lest they should hear 
 the travellers talking with him. Before he could be reassured, the 
 ladies had to talk with each other in a loud voice to deceive the 
 zapties below, and to cover the whispered conversation between the 
 dragoman and their host, whom they described as " a young man with 
 a fresh colour and rounded contour ; an European, but quaking, 
 almost convulsed, with fear." 
 
 "The whispers became quicker and more eagei*. Our question as to the 
 state of the Christians had acted like the sudden withdrawal of the dam from a 
 stream ; the pent-up waters overflowed — the rayah was pouring out his tale. 
 • The Christian community of Novi-Bazar is at the mercy of the Mussulmans ; 
 they enter houses both by day and night, take what they choose, and behave 
 as they will. Raise an arm or speak a word, and you bring on yourself death 
 or the loss of a limb. Make a representation to the authorities, and you are 
 ruined by the revenge of those of whom you, have dared to complain.' 
 
 " We asked if within the last few years things had become better or worse. 
 
 " ' In so far they are better that the officials now sent from Constantinople 
 are jealous of the beys, and the beys of them, and the two opposing cliques 
 act as some sort of check on each other. The Christians are less persecuted 
 in their dress and other trifles, and they may enter their own quarter of the 
 town on horseback, though it would still not be safe to ride past a Mussulman 
 in the road or the bazaar. On the other hand, since last year gi-eat repression 
 has been exercised, for fear of the Christians rising to join the Serbians over 
 the border. We have been obliged to do forced labour in raising defences, 
 and to contribute both in food and money to the maintenance of troops — and 
 such troops ! Do you know that last summer Bashi-Bazotiks were sent to 
 Novi-Bazar? But no insult, no injury is so hard to bear as that of Mussulmans 
 carrying off Christian girls. Lately a maiden of the rayah community was 
 servant in a Mussulman family. Suddenly her parents were informed that she 
 had become a Mohammedan ; she was not suffered to return to them nor see
 
 38 
 
 them, but was sent off to Saraievo. She escaped, came back to her family, 
 and they ventured to give her shelter ; but the Mussulmans tracked her home, 
 and their vengeance fell upon the whole Christian community. Out of its I lo 
 houses, at least lOO Avere in their estimate connected with the escape of the 
 poor girl. All felt the weight of their wrath, and several were completely 
 ruined." — Pp. 305 — 6. 
 
 Speaking of Stara Serbia, or Old Serbia, Miss Mackenzie and 
 Miss Irby say : — 
 
 "The condition of affairs is indeed bad enough to reduce to despair all its 
 inhabitants, excepting, of course, those evil men who thrive on it. The Porte 
 having exerted energies sufficient to extinguish national liberty in Albania, and 
 to drive great numbers of Albanians to apostatise, has never carried its pains 
 to the point of bringing its new adherents into the attitude of orderly citizens. 
 Whenever authority is exerted over them, it is in order to obtain recruits, or to 
 impose Turkish officials in lieu of the old hereditary Governors — not to enforce 
 a just treatment of the Christians. In the toMms of Stara Serbia the Governor 
 is a Turkish official, sometimes an Osmanli who does not know the language 
 of the country, sometimes an Albanian who has served in the regular army. 
 This official supports his authority by aid of a few- zapties and cavasses in 
 his own service, and these useful persons derive their pay chiefly from what 
 they can rob from the people. The mudir, kaimakan, or pasha buys his post, 
 to begin with, and is then left to enjoy it so short a time that his chief aim is 
 to re-imburse himself as quickly as possible. Every one knows this, so 
 Mussulmans and Christians alike ply him with bribes. But besides enriching 
 himself, he has to raise the Sultan's taxes. If the Mussulmans will not pay 
 their share, he must doubly fleece the Christians ; for the Mussulmans are not 
 to be trifled with, as, should he offend them, they may bribe some higher 
 authority to remove him from his post. At Prishtina this was constantly the 
 case: the' mudir we found there was the second in a year, and before we left 
 the district he was already deposed." — Pp. 255 — 6. . 
 
 There are many things in this volume which serve to throw 
 considerable light upon what has puzzled many persons in this 
 country, namely, the announcement that in the great Council recently 
 called to decide on the proposals of the Christian Powers, the heads 
 of the various Christian Churches in the Sultan's dominion gave their 
 vote against those proposals. It appears that all the highest officers 
 in the Greek Church are appointed by the Turkish Government. 
 
 "To this day," say the writers, "no prelate throughout the Ottoman empire 
 can exercise his functions without an Imperial firman." — P. 32. 
 
 Again, speaking of Stara Serbia, they say : — 
 
 "Of the Christian community the principle representative is properly the 
 bishop ; hence nothing could more effectually take the heart out of the Sclavs 
 in Turkey, than the transfer of this important office o Greeks, who do not care 
 a rush for Sclavonic interests. In most parts of Old Serbia the idea we found 
 associated with a bishop was that of a person who carried off what few paras 
 the Turks had left."— P. 258.
 
 39 
 
 Ver}' significant also is the following : — 
 
 "Throughout the Serb provinces still under Turkey — Boznia, Herzegovina, 
 and Stara Serbia — we found all the bishops Greeks ; one only was present in his 
 diocese, and he had but lately returned from Constantinople to squeeze from 
 the \ATetched peasantry that revenue which his compeers where staying in 
 Constantinople to spend. In default of payment, the Turkish authorities 
 are invoked to extort the bishop's dues : and the minor clergy, fleeced by their 
 superiors, are constrained to sell every rite of the Church. One peasant 
 affirmed that the corpse of his brother had been left lying in his house until 
 he could raise what the priest asked to bury it — two gold ducats paid in 
 advance. Throughout the Sclavonic provinces the Greek bishop has become 
 enrolled in the same category as the Turkish Governors ; and, so soon as a 
 million of Serbs secured to themselves autonomous administration, they 
 placed their relations to the oecumenical patriarch on the same footing as their 
 vassalage to the Padishah." — P. 375. 
 
 Turkish Rule in Palestine. 
 
 We will now turn to another traveller, whose evidence relates to a 
 different part of the country under Turkish rule. Captain Charles 
 Warren was engaged for several years in making explorations in 
 Syria, and especially at Jerusalem. It is not necessary to dwell on 
 the many obstacles throw^n in his way by the disorder prevailing in 
 the countr}'-, and the duplicity, trickery, and bad faith of the Turkish 
 authorities. We will merely cite a few passages illustrative of the 
 execrable misrule which smites the land of Palestine with blight and 
 •desolation. In a chapter on the " Resources of Palestine," he enume- 
 rates the principal reasons why it is now so unfruitful and unhealthy, 
 and the difficulties in the way of improvement : — 
 
 "The first and foremost difficulty is the present bad government; the 
 people are oppressed, are wronged ; there is no feeling of security for property 
 or person, no justice, no honesty, among the officials. Bribery and corruption, 
 according to our meaning of the terms, are mild words to use towards the 
 infamous means by which money is extorted from the poor. And, unfortu- 
 nately, the maladministration commences from the top ; no pasha could afford 
 to be honest, no governor-general could venture to be just. The whole 
 organism of the country lies on a rotten foundation, which is constantly being 
 underpinned by the fortunes and lives of the Christians, and often, too, by 
 those of the Moslems who have not been sufficiently wily to avoid getting into 
 difficulties ; but nothing will ever make that rotten foundation solid, based, as 
 it is, on the Turks' view that the Christians and Jews cannot be admitted to an 
 equal position in the country with the followers of the Prophet. The Moslem 
 religion has entered into a phase which will admit of no prosperity in the 
 land. Days were when trade by Christians and Jews was fostered, when the 
 rulers of the country understood the art of governing; but now nothing is 
 taught but the art of misrule, for Moslem fortunes are in the hands of the 
 barbarous Turk
 
 40 
 
 *' It is not the Christian alone of Syria that the Turk oppresses : the Arab 
 Moslem is, if not equally, yet most hardly used. Many a time have the Arab 
 Moslems said to me, * When will you take this country and rid us of our 
 oppressors; anything is better 'than their mle.' For the Turk has no affinity 
 of race or language to connect him with, or give him a right to rule, the Arab. 
 He has no power of sympathising with the Semitic races, and his religion is 
 but in name. The Arab, if I may use such an expression, is a Moslem by 
 nature ; the Turk cannot become a Moslem by art. 
 
 * ' He is sent to Palestine to govern badly ; he is given but a small salary, 
 and is obliged to squeeze the peoi^le in order to pay his own officials and to 
 live, to recoup himself for what he has paid for his appointment in the past, 
 and to carry away Math him something for the future wherewith he may buy a 
 higher appointment, or purchase immunity for the consequences of his evil 
 deeds, should complaints be made against his rule. 
 
 * ' The Turk can never govern Palestine well ; and until he departs the 
 country must remain half desert, half prison ; for it is his policy to leave it so. 
 He wants it to continue impoverished, so that it may not tempt the cupidity of 
 stronger nations. This was brought home to me once, when, in conversation 
 with an eminent Turk, I was pressing the advantages of a bridge across the 
 Jordan and other matters ; he answered me warmly, ' We want no discoveries ;. 
 we want no attention paid to Palestine ; we M^ant no roads. Leave the place 
 alone. If it becomes rich, we shall lose it ; if it remains poor, it will continue 
 in our hands. God be praised.' In vain I urged that if the country were 
 well governed there would be no occasion for taking it from Turkey. His 
 idea was, ' If we make it valuable, you will want it. Let us keep it in 
 poverty. ' Well ! he tries to keep it in poverty, and succeeds to some extent 
 in reality, and to a great extent in appearance 
 
 **The fruit-trees are taxed, even from the day on which they are planted, 
 year by year, though they may not be productive for a long time to come ; so 
 that if a man plants a thousand fig-trees or olives, he pays nearly ;!^io sterling 
 per annum for years before they yield him any profit. For what purpose can 
 such a system be put in force, except for retarding cultivation, and keeping 
 back the country ? It certainly cannot be for the purpose of getting a revenue, 
 for with such a law few will plant. 
 
 " The people are treated with equal cruelty in regard to the gathering in of 
 their corn. When they have thrashed and winnowed, they leave it heaped up 
 on the floor for the government inspector to see and take his share ; and often 
 it happens that a large portion is decayed or destroyed before he arrives." — 
 Underground yeriisalem, pp. 449 — 54. 
 
 Turkish Rule in Syria. 
 
 " Unexplored Syria " is the title of a work published by Captain 
 Burton, who was for a considerable time British Consul at Damascus. 
 
 "Captain Burton," says the reviewer in the Times, "is eminently 
 conscientious and accurate in his observations, and he tells us quite enough 
 to confirm us in the idea that the administration of Syria, as of other Turkish 
 provinces, is execrable. So mercilessly have the villagers been oppressed and
 
 41 
 
 fleeced by the tax-gatherers, that for a hundred and fifty years past there has 
 been a steady exodus from the more settled districts to the remote settlements 
 that look towards the Euphrates desert. We have the statement that in the 
 last five years of Raschid Pasha's administration no less than seventeen 
 mountain villages Avere depopulated, while in a single autumn between seven 
 hundred and eight hundred families had taken their flight to the eastward." 
 
 " \Ye can hardly wonder," says Captain Burton, "at the exodus when we 
 are told that nearly half the settlements of the Jaydur district, the ancient 
 Jhirsea — eleven out of twenty-four — have been within twelve months ruined by 
 
 the usurer and the tax-gatherer It is hardly necessary to dwell 
 
 on the short-sighted and miserable management which drives an industrious 
 peasantry from its hearths and homes to distant settlements, where defence is 
 much more easy than offence, and where, as Cromwell said of Pease Burn, ten 
 men to hinder are better than a hundred to make their way. This upon a 
 small scale is a specimen of the system which keeps down to a million and a 
 half the population of a province which, though not larger than Lancashire and 
 Yorkshire imited, in the days of Strabo and Josephus supported its ten 
 millions and more." — Pp. 179 — 181 
 
 We will borrow one other notation from that portion of "Un- 
 explored Syria " which we owe to Mrs. Burton's pen : — 
 
 "From Dinan we resumed our way through the Jibbah Bisherri, the 'village 
 land of Bisherri,' which lies on the western or seaward face of the Libanus. 
 This is the heart of the Maronite or purely Christian region ; and this district, 
 like Jezzin, farther south, and Sadad (the ancient Zedad ?) to the north-east, 
 produces a manly, independent race, fond of horses and amis, with whom I am 
 not ashamed to own community of faith. 
 
 " Undisturbed by the defiling presence of Rashid Pasha, the people are 
 happy and contented; their industry has converted every yard of rock-ledge 
 into a miniature field ; they show a steadily increasing population, resulting 
 from the absence of the tax-gatherer and the recmiting officer ; and their only 
 troubles are those bred and born of Ottoman intrigues, of that barbarous policy 
 which still says, *Di\dde and rule them all.' Long may the Reglement de la 
 Montague reign ! may Muscovite lord it in Stamboul ere a Moslem governor is 
 suffered to rule the land of the Maronite ! The words applied by Dr. Hooker 
 to Marocco are perfectly descriptive of unhappy Syria under her present 
 affliction: — 'The government is despotic, cntel, and wrong-headed in every 
 sense ; from the Sultan to the lowest soldier, all are paid by squeezing those in 
 their power. 
 
 "Marocco itself is more than half ruinous, and its prisons loaded; the 
 population of the whole kingdom is diminishing ; and what with droughts, 
 locusts, cholera, and prohibitory effects of the most arbitrary description, the 
 nation is on the brink of ruin ; and but that two-thirds of the kingdon is inde- 
 pendent of the Sultan's authority, being held by absolute mountain chiefs, who 
 defy his power to tax or interfere with them, and that the European merchants 
 maintain the coast trade, and the consuls keep the Sultan's emissaries in check, 
 Marocco would present a scene of the wildest disorder." — Unexplored Syria, 
 pp. 108, 109.
 
 42 
 
 Turkish Rule in Bulgaria. 
 
 Mr. Henry C. Barkley is a gentleman who has been] engaged for 
 many years in connection with railway work in Turkey. In his work 
 recently published, entitled, "Between the Danube and Black 
 Sea," he records principally his experiences in Bulgaria. Of the 
 Bulgarians he speaks in terms of commendation as a quiet, industrious, 
 honest people ; but, like all other travellers, he testifies to the cruel 
 and oppressive, character of Turkish rule. He says : — 
 
 "The Bulgarians, and also the Turkish villagers, are loud in their com- 
 plaints of the injustice and tyranny of the Turkish officials. All — from the 
 governor-general to the hangman — think it right and just, when on a journey, 
 to quarter themselves on the peasants, without ever thinking of paying ; and at 
 the same time they demand the services of their host and his family, and the 
 best of everything there is to be had. The largest and most prosperous of the 
 villages are built as far as possible from the main roads leading to and from the 
 fortified towns, such as Widdin, Rustchuk, Shumla, &c. If they are on the 
 line of march, the troops live on them at free quarters, their carts and 
 beasts are seized for transport services, and the owners themselves forced to 
 accompany them as drivers, and are obliged to find food for themselves and 
 fodder for the cattle, for all of which they receive no recompence. In conse- 
 quence of this, all the villages that, from force of circumstances, have to be 
 near some main road, are a miserable collection of hovels offering but small 
 temptation to the traveller. About twelve miles from Varna, and not far off 
 the route to Shumla, is the flourishing village of Gebedgi, M'hich is partly 
 Turkish, partly Bulgar. On entering it one is at once struck by the appearance 
 of prosperity exhibited in the well-built houses and large flocks of cattle. 
 Between this village and the road is a swamp with a narrow but deep brook 
 running through it. To assist in the construction of the line which passed by 
 the village, I caused a road to be made across the marsh, and a wooden bridge 
 thrown over the brook. The first night after the bridge was completed it was 
 cut down ; and on making inquiries about it, a Turk told me that, rather than 
 live with this easy access to the road, the inhabitants, both Turks and Bulgars, 
 would burn their houses and migrate to some spot where Turkish officials, 
 Turkish troops, and above all Turkish zaptiehs, could not so easily get at 
 them. 'Above all, zaptiehs,' for they are the constant and never-ending curse 
 of all the villages, \vhether Turkish or Bulgar. They are recruited from the 
 very lowest and most ruffianly of the Turks. Many, if not most, of them have 
 been brigands, and all are robbers. Their pay (even when they get it) is not 
 sufficient to support them, and therefore they depend on their position to 
 secure the comforts of life. They live on the peasants, and all they have, from 
 their pipe to their horse, has been robbed from them. Over and over again 
 I have seen every woman and girl of an entire Christian village disappear as if 
 by magic at the approach of a zaptieh ; and when he enters the village, all 
 the men stand staring about, watching to see what may take place, like a flock 
 of sheep when a strange dog comes among them." — Preface, pp. vi. — viii. 
 
 Mr. Barkley first went to Bulgaria soon after the conclusion of the 
 Crimean war. One of his earliest insights into the character of Turkish
 
 43 
 
 rule is given in the following passage. Speaking of the town of 
 Rustindju, Mr. Barkley says : — 
 
 " We had a visit from the Tchorbadjie, or head man of the little town. 
 He was a Bulgar, as were nearly all the inhabitants, and proved a quiet, 
 decent fellow. There was a dash of melancholy in his looks, which we 
 thought was accounted for when he told us that when the war first broke out 
 a regiment of Bashi-Bazouks was sent up here to look after a few Cossacks 
 who had crossed the Danube, and were acting as scouts. They encamped for 
 the night on the very spot we were just quitting, and before they left the 
 next morning they set fire to the town, and even took the corn out of the 
 granary, piled it up in the streets, and burnt it. Some of the young Bulgars 
 remonstrated with them, and were at once cut down and hacked to pieces. 
 Of the horrors the women went through I dare not write ; but of one thing I 
 feel sure — as long as there is a Sultan in Turkey every Bulgar will curse him 
 for having let loose such a mob of devils on them. We afterwards heard this 
 tale corroborated by many Christians and a few Turks, though the latter tried 
 to make the best of it." — Pp. i8, 19. 
 
 Speaking of the intense cold which occasionally prevails in that 
 country, Mr. Barkely tells the following anecdote : — 
 
 "The Pasha of Varna had some time before this sent orders to a distant 
 village for a supply of wood. Five arabas, each with a Bulgar driver, arrived 
 at dusk, just as the storm commenced. They inquired where they should 
 deliver the wood, but no one knew exactly where the woodstack had better be 
 made, and the pasha's servants, fearing if it were discharged at the wrong 
 place that they should have to remove it themselves, determined to do nothing 
 till the morning. The arabas were therefore escorted into a large barrack- 
 yard surrounded with high w^alls, and there locked in for the night. The 
 cries and shouts for help from the five men were disregarded, and no further 
 notice was taken of them till the next morning, when they were found huddled 
 together in the snow, all dead. No matter ; they were Bulgar dogs, and it 
 was Kisnet ! No one was punished ; the wood was not paid for ; but pay- 
 ment for the keep of the wretched bullocks was extorted from the friends ot 
 the dead men when they came to fetch them away a month later. Look out, 
 * sick man ! ' you are getting weaker every day, and these ' dogs ' are waxing 
 stronger ; they will turn and worry you before long, and, when that day comes, 
 who will care to drive them from their lawful prey ? " — Pp. 62, 63. 
 
 We come now to another most intelligent traveller, Mr. Arthur J. 
 Evans. His experience brings down our knowledge of the state of 
 things in the European provinces of Turkey to the most recent date. 
 While he and his brother were travelling through Boznia and the 
 Herzegovina, the insurrection actually broke out. In what they saw 
 and heard of the universally oppressed condition of the people, there 
 is ample cause for the insurrection, without having recourse to the 
 idea of foreign instigation. " The wrongs of the Christians in Boznia," 
 says Mr. Evans, "have been intolerable;" and few who read his 
 volume will doubt the justice of the remark. Here is one extrac 
 illustrative of those intolerable wrongs : —
 
 44 
 
 "Aug. 22.— To-day we made the acquaintance of the German Consul, 
 Count Von Bothmar, who expressed considerable surprise at our arriving here 
 unmolested. From him and the other members of the consular body, who M^ere 
 very ready to supply us with full details as to the stirring events that are 
 taking place around us, we learnt many interesting facts relative to the causes 
 and course of the insurrection in Bosnia. These accounts, and others from 
 trustworthy sources, reveal such frantic oppressions and gross misgovernment 
 as must be hardly credible to Englishmen. We have heard all that can be 
 said on the Turkish side, but the main facts remain unshaken. 
 
 "The truth is, that outside Serajevo and a few of the larger towns where 
 there are Consuls or 'resident Europeans,' neither the honour, property, nor 
 the lives of Christians are safe. Gross outrages against the person — murder 
 itself— can be committed in the rural districts with impunity. The authorities 
 are blind ; and it is quite a common thing for the gendarmes to let the 
 perpetrator of the grossest outrage, if a Mussulman, escape before their eyes. 
 Miss Irby, who has made many inquiries on these subjects, estimates that in 
 the Medgliss, the only court where Christian evidence is even legally admitted, 
 'the evidence of twenty Christians would be outweighed by two Mussulmans.' 
 But why, it may be asked, do not the Christians appeal to the Consuls for 
 protection ? In the first place, in a mountainous country like Bosnia, with 
 little means of communication, to do so would in most cases be a physical 
 impossibility. In the second place, as Count Bothmar assured us, if such 
 complaint is made to a Consul, so surely is the complaining rayah more cruelly 
 oppressed than before ; nor is consular authority so omnipresent as to save 
 him and his family from ruin. ' God alone knows, ' he exclaimed, * what the 
 rayahs suffer in the country districts ! ' Remembering the revolting scenes, of 
 which I had been a witness, at the Christian gathering near Comusina, I could 
 believe this, 
 
 " But the most galling oppression, and the main cause of the present revolt, 
 is to be found in the system and manner of taxation. The centralised govern- 
 ment, set up in Bosnia since 185 1, is so much machinery for wringing the 
 uttermost farthing out of the unhappy Bosniac rayah. The desperate efforts of 
 Turkish financiers, on the eve of national bankruptcy, have at last made the 
 burden of taxation more than even the long-suffering Bosniac can bear. It 
 was the last straw. 
 
 "The principal tax — besides the house and land tax, and that paid by the 
 'Christian,' in lieu of military service, which is wrung from the poorest 
 rayah for every male of his family down to the baby in arms — is the eighth, or, 
 as it is facetiously called by the tax-collector, the tenth, w^hich is levied on all 
 .produce of the earth. With regard to the exaction of this tax, every conceiv- 
 able iniquity is practised. To begin with, its collection is farmed out to 
 middle-men, and these ex officio pitiless, are usually by origin the scum of the 
 Levant. The Osmanli or the Sclavonic Mahometan possesses a natural dignity 
 and self-respect which disinclines him for such dirty work. The men who come 
 forward and offer the highest price for the license of extortion are more often 
 Christians — Fanariote Greeks — adventurers from Stamboul, members of a race 
 perhaps the vilest of mankind. No considerations of honour, or religion, or 
 humanity, restrain these wretches. Having acquired the right to farm the 
 taxes of a given district, the Turkish officials and gendarmerie are bound to 
 support them in wringing the uttermost farthing out of the miscTa contribiiens
 
 45 
 
 plebs^ and it is natural that this help should be most readily forthcoming when 
 needed to break the resistance of the rayah. 
 
 " These men time their visitation well. They appear in the villages before 
 the harvest is gathered, and assess the value of the crops according to the pre- 
 sent prices, which, of course, are far higher just before the harvest than after 
 it. But the rayahs would be well contented if their exactions stopped here. 
 They possess, however, a terrible lever for putting the screw on the miserable 
 tiller. The hai-vest may not be gathered till the tax, which is pitilessly levied 
 in cash, has been extorted. If the full amount — and they often double or 
 treble the legal sum — is not forthcoming, the tax-gatherer simply has to say — 
 * Then your harvest shall rot on the ground till you pay it \ ' And the rayah 
 must see the produce of his toil lost, or pay a iiiinous imposition, which more 
 than swamps his profits. Or, if he still remains obstinate, there are other 
 paraphernalia of torture worthy of the vaults of the Inquisition. A village 
 will occasionally band together to defend themselves from these extortioners. 
 Thereupon the tithe -farmer applies to the civil power, protesting that if he 
 does not get the full amount from the village, he will be unable in his turn to 
 pay the Government. The zaptiehs, the factotums of the Turkish officials, are 
 immediately quartered on the villagers, and live on them, insult their wives, 
 and ill-treat their children. With the aid of these gentry, all kinds of personal 
 tortures ai-e applied to the recalcitrant. In the heat of summer men are 
 stripped naked and tied to a tree, smeared over with honey or other sweet 
 stuff, and left to the tender mercies of the insect-world. For winter extortion 
 it is found convenient to bind people to stakes, and leave them barefooted to 
 be frostbitten ; or at other times they are shoved into a pigstye, and cold water 
 poured on them. A favourite plan is to drive a party of rayahs up a tree, or 
 into a chamber, and then smoke them Math green wood. Instances are 
 recorded of Bosniac peasants being buried up to their heads in earth, and left 
 to repent at leisure. I will quote a single instance of these practices, com- 
 municated by the Princess Julia of Servia to the author of ' Servda and the 
 Ser\dans :' — ' A poor woman, frantic with agony, burst into the palace of the 
 princess at Belgrade. She had been assessed by the Turkish authorities of a 
 
 village in Bosnia of a sum which she had no means of paying She was 
 
 smoked. This failed of extracting the gold. She begged for a remission, and 
 stated her inability to pay. In answer, she was tossed into the river Drina, 
 and after her were thrown her two infant children — one of four years old, the 
 other of two. Before her eyes, notwithstanding her frantic efforts to save 
 them, her children perished. Half-drowned and insensible, she was dragged 
 to land by a Servian peasant. She made her way to Belgrade, believing, 
 from the character of the princess for humanity, that she would aid her. Of 
 course, to do so was out of the question. ' 
 
 '* Gustave Thoemmel, who was attached to the American Consulate here, 
 relates how the application of such tortures drove many Bosnian rayahs 
 to desperation in 1865, No less than 500 families took refuge across the 
 borders from these inquisitors in the spring of that year. They were, however, 
 turned back, and forced to return to their homes in Bosnia in a most deplorable 
 state. ' Complaint,' says Thoemmel, ' about outrages of this kind are scarcely 
 ever brought forward, since the rayah seldom obtains evidence, or even hearing, 
 and his complaining only brings down on him increased persecution ; so it
 
 46 
 
 happens that the higher officials often remain in ignorance of the barbarities 
 perpetrated by their underlings.' " — Pp. 254 — 9. 
 
 Mr. J. Evans gives instances which came within his own observa- 
 tion of the brutal insolence with which the officials of the Mahommedan 
 Government deal with the Christian Bosniacs when not under the 
 immediate surveillance of foreign Consuls. 
 
 "Briefly," he says, "they treated them like a herd of cattle; and it is 
 hard to say which was the more revolting — the intolerable insolence or the 
 downright cruelty. I was standing," he continues, "in one of the circles 
 where a Bosnian gleeman was rehearsing a national epic, when the spell of the 
 song was rudely broken by a zaptieh, who, bursting through the ring of 
 listeners, and thrusting the rayahs to right and left, stood before the embers in 
 the middle, and playing Avith his cutlass in one hand, demanded who would 
 light his pipe in such a savage tone as quite infuriated me. The Bosniacs took 
 it more calmly. The old minstrel laid down his lute, and paused for awhile in 
 his lay. For a few moments there was a moody silence, as if some blunted sense 
 of injury had outlived long use of wrong ; then a fine man stepped forward 
 sheepishly and lit the bully's pipe. 
 
 ' ' Another time a knot of peasants were gathered together in friendly 
 converse on the grassy middle-lane, when two zaptiehs rushed forward with 
 whips and flogged them away, zvomen as well as men ! But the worst instance 
 of brutality that came within my observation took place while I was discussing 
 a bottle of Slavonian wine, and exchanging English songs for Bosnian, with a 
 merry group of rayahs belonging mostly to the Greek Church — 'Serbs,' as 
 they proudly called themselves — who had come to take part in the fair and 
 festa of their Roman Catholic rivals. Of a sudden our festivities were broken 
 in upon by the sounds of a scuffle behind, accompanied by such shrieks as 
 made me start up ; and the firelight fell upon a gendarme — the same, I think, 
 who had interrupted the minstrelsy — who with a stick or some kind of weapon 
 was beating an old Christian man as if he were a pig, and kicking the poor 
 cringing wretch the while till he howled for mercy. I was stepping forward 
 to interpose, but two Bosniacs clutched hold of me and held me back, whis- 
 pering, with more covered hatred than can be described, ' 'Tis only the 
 Turks ! ' The zaptieh, however, not wishing to provoke Frankish interven- 
 tion, desisted from his belabouring, and left his victim to limp away as best he 
 might. The group of ' Serbs ' had not shown any sign of attempting a rescue, 
 but I saw more than one brow ominously knit for the moment. But the 
 visible emotion was transient, and their faces relapsed into that impassable 
 stolidity which is the noi-mal expression of the Bosnian rayah." — Pp. 141 — 3. 
 
 And now we close with the testimony of the last traveller who has 
 visited Turkey — Sir George Campbell. Personally he is more favour- 
 ably disposed to the Turkish race than most of those who have dwelt 
 long among them. The more important, therefore, is the evidence 
 he gives as to the execrable character of their government : — 
 
 "When," he says, "we come to political rights and trusts, then I say that, 
 at this moment, and now perhaps more than at any previous period of 
 Turkish history, the Christians are placed in a humiliating and enthralled
 
 47 
 
 position which has no parallel in the world. Think of a system under which 
 no Christian can bear arms in any capacity, not even the baton of a policeman, 
 nor exercise any executive authority, even the pettiest ; under which not only 
 the whole army, but the whole executive administration — the whole police 
 down to the village watchman — are all of the dominant Mahommedan minority, 
 while the Christian majority are entirely and without exception a subject 
 people ! Compare this state of things with the liberal government of the 
 Mogul Emperors in India, where the Hindoos were employed in thousands 
 and tens of thousands, both in the army and the civil administration, where 
 many of the chief ministers were Hindoos, and where one of the Emperors 
 even went so far as to appoint a Hindoo General to be Governor of Mahom- 
 medan Cabul. Compare it with the everyday and uncoerced practices of 
 native States in India at this day. There is hardly a Hindoo State which 
 has not many Mahommedans in its higher offices, and hardly a Mahommedan 
 State which has not many Hindoos in similar offices. 
 
 " Whatever, then, the material position of the Christians of Turkey, and 
 however their sufferings from bad government may be, more or less, in par- 
 ticular provinces and under particular Pashas, it seems to me that they have 
 everywhere a political grievance of the most crying and outrageous description. 
 For the rest, it cannot be doubted there is overwhelming concurrence of testi- 
 mony to this : that under a most inefficient and corrupt Government, and the 
 extreme domination of an alien race, Christians were very frequently ill-treated 
 and oppressed in an extreme degi-ee. It is patent that they were often outraged 
 by Turks, and plundered by Circassians. Yet on the whole, considering the 
 extreme badness of the situation, the excessive opportunities to impune outrage 
 and oppression in the hands of a race themselves ill-used, discontented, and 
 downgoing, the irritation natural to the attempt to cure one evil by another — 
 the domination of the Turks by the abuses of ill-regulated Consular protection 
 — looking to all the circumstances, I must say, I think the wonder is, not that 
 there was so much outrage and plunder, but that there was not more. It is 
 only because the Turks are not personally a very bad race that the case was 
 not worse. But things were coming to a crisis. The tension between the races 
 was increasing. The pot of discontent, oppression, and recrimination was 
 ready to boil over." — A Recent View of Turkey, Sir George Campbell, p. 1 12. 
 
 It would be easy to multiply these testimonies; the difficulty, 
 indeed, is where to stop. We had once thought of subjoining to these 
 recent evidences of Turkish misrule taken from travellers a series of 
 extracts from more recent Consular reports, and other official docu- 
 ments to the same effect. But this has been already so well done by 
 the Rev. W. Denton, in his admirable little volume entitled " The 
 Christians of Turkey," that we must be content to refer our readers 
 to his pages, where they will find also abundant other matter illus- 
 trative of the same subject.
 
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