196 



TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTELY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



tion in the direction of Widdin, by letting the 

 Christians believe that the intention of the Porte 

 was to expel them from their hearths in order to 

 put the Circassians in their place. 



About twenty thousand persons allowed them- 

 selves to be seduced by the promises which were 

 made to them, and abandoned their hearths. 

 Subsequently, however, they asked the Ottoman 

 Government to be allowed to return to their 

 country; and, as these unfortunates had fruit- 

 lessly expended the slender resources which they 

 possessed, the Government had to charter ships 

 to effect their transport, and to supply them 

 with oxen and with instruments of husbandry 

 to cultivate their fields, which were restored to 

 them. 



In 1865 and in 1866, with the object of cre- 

 ating a revolution in Bulgaria, organized bands 

 were sent thither from Kishnieff by way of Bu- 

 charest. They crossed the Danube near Sistova, 

 and advanced up to the Balkans between Tirnova 

 and Selvi ; but, having met with no support on 

 the part of the Bulgarians, they were beaten 

 and dispersed by the gendarmerie, aided by the 

 inhabitants of the country. I must here remind 

 the reader that, on the passage of these bands, 

 the first act which they committed was the mas- 

 sacre of five poor Mussulman children of the 

 town from eight to ten years of age, who were 

 out walking. 



Evidently the object of this horrible deed was 

 to incite the Mussulmans to reprisals against the 

 Christians, and to take advantage of the conse- 

 quences that they would bring about, to stir the 

 country to insurrection, and to make Europe be- 

 lieve that the Christians were oppressed and mas- 

 sacred by the Turks ; but the Mussulmans re- 

 mained quiet, and the scheme of the wire-pullers 

 was defeated. In presence of this state of things 

 the committees were obliged to make a change 

 of tactics ; and so, instead of sending schoolmas- 

 ters to the Bulgarians to teach their children, they 

 took every year a good number of pupils recruited 

 among the Christian population, and placed them 

 in schools in Russia, whence they returned to their 

 homes to propagate Panslavist ideas. 



This took place while the Russian embassy at 

 Constantinople was obtaining a firman recognizing 

 a national Bulgarian church independent of the 

 Greek Church. 



But it is not my intention to trace the course 

 that Russian diplomacy has pursued against us, 

 nor to repeat what is known to every one of the 

 operations of the committees. I would only wish 

 it to be known that these revolts and insurrec- 



tions, the wild excesses of the Sultan Aziz in the 

 last years of his reign, the senseless expenditure 

 of the court, followed by expedients of a disas- 

 trous kind, and all the misfortunes which one 

 after another came to overwhelm us, all proceed 

 more or less from the same source. 



Nor is it for me to speak of the circumstances 

 which led to the war ; they are too recent and 

 well known to need mention. I will here, how- 

 ever, to say but one word in connection with the 

 conference at Constantinople, remark that a care- 

 ful perusal of the first paragraph of the appendix 

 to the circular of Prince Gortchakoff, which ap- 

 peared in the Journal Officiel of St. Petersburg 

 on the 9th of April last, will prove that what 

 Russia wished to obtain from Turkey by means 

 of the conference hardly differed at all from the 

 conditions she has imposed on her by her Treaty 

 of San Stefano, to which the Marquis of Salisbury 

 has done full justice in his admirable note of the 

 1st of April. 



And hence we are justified in saying that Tur- 

 key could not of her own accord assent to stipu- 

 lations which Russia, in spite of her successes, 

 finds it no easy task at this moment to. make Eu- 

 rope accept. There is not a government, there 

 is not a nation in the world, which could have 

 accepted those conditions, especially when it is 

 borne in mind that in our case the people were 

 eager to defend at any cost their rights and their 

 honor, and that 500,000 soldiers were awaiting 

 the signal of battle and laying claim to the honor 

 of dying for their country. Turkey was not un- 

 aware of the attitude of the English Government 

 toward her ; the British cabinet had declared in 

 clear terms that it would not interfere in our dis- 

 pute. 



This decision of the English cabinet was per- 

 fectly well known to us ; but we knew still better 

 that the general interests of Europe, and the par- 

 ticular interests of England, were so bound up in 

 our dispute with Russia, that, in spite of all the 

 declarations of the English cabinet, it appeared 

 to us to be absolutely impossible for her to avoid 

 interfering sooner or later in this Eastern dispute. 

 This profound belief, added to the reasons we 

 have mentioned, was one of the principal factors 

 of our contest with Russia. The last steps taken 

 by the English cabinet have justified the antici- 

 pations of Ottoman ministers : England has in- 

 tervened, as they foresaw she would, unhappily 

 a little later than they had reckoned. 



As may be inferred from what I have said, 

 the sole motive power of Russia's policy in the 

 East was the right of protection which from the 



