This announcement caused
much surprise and comment in England. Public feeling already aroused,
was not allayed when it became known that the British fleet in the
Mediterranean had been ordered to Besiki Bay, seemingly for the
protection of the Turkish Empire.
June 28th the Bulgarian insurrection was suppressed. On the 10th of July
the Sultan, Abdul Aziz, was deposed and was succeeded by Murad V, who
declared that he desired to guarantee liberty to all. Mr. Disraeli
stated, in the House of Commons, that the steps taken by the Ministry
would lead to permanent peace. But within two weeks the _Daily News_
published a letter from Constantinople detailing the massacre in
Bulgaria by the Turks, which moved all England with indignation.
Innocent men, women and children had been slaughtered by the thousands;
at least sixty villages had been utterly destroyed; the most revolting
scenes of violence had been enacted; and a district once the most
fertile in the Empire had been laid waste and completely ruined. Forty
girls were shut up in a straw loft and burnt, and outrages of the most
fearful description were committed upon hundreds of defenceless
captives.
Mr. Disraeli, in the House of Commons, grew "jocular upon the cruelties
and sufferings almost unparalleled in the world's history," and
expressed his belief that the outrages committed by the Turkish troops
had been exaggerated, and sneered at the rumor as "coffee-house babble;"
while as to the torture of the impalement, which had caused universal
anger and disgust, that an Oriental people have their way of executing
malefactors, and generally terminated their connection with culprits in
an expeditious manner.
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