Chapter II: Gladstone and the Bulgarian Atrocities

In the list of massacres antedating the colossal crimes which have come under my own personal observation, is cited the killing of 14,700 Bulgarians in 1876. This butchery of a comparatively few—from a Turkish view-point—Bulgarians, some fifty years ago, provoked a splendid cry of indignation from Gladstone. As this narrative develops and reaches the dark days of 1915 to 1922, during which period whole nations were wiped out by the ax, the club and the knife, and the Turk at last found the opportunity to give full vent to his evil passions, it will appear that no similarly effective protest has issued from the lips of any European or American statesman.

The curious feature is that, owing to the propaganda carried on by the hunters of certain concessions, an anti-Christian and pro-Turk school has sprung up in the United States.

In _A Short History of the Near East_, Professor William Stearns Davis, of the University of Minnesota, referring to the Bulgarian atrocities of 1876, says:

“What followed seems a massacre on a small scale compared with
the slaughter of Armenians in 1915-16, but it was enough to
paralyze the power of Disraeli to protect the Turks. In all,
about twelve thousand Christians seem to have been massacred.
At the thriving town of Batal five thousand out of seven
thousand inhabitants seem to have perished. Of course neither
age or sex was spared and lust and perfidy were added to other
acts of devilishness. It is a pitiful commentary on a phase
of British politics that Disraeli and his fellow Tories tried
their best to minimize the reports of these atrocities. They
were not given to the world by official consular reports, but
by private English journalists.”

The above is interesting, as it illustrates a quite common method of government procedure in such cases. The Tory does not seem to be a unique product of British politics.

While I was in Europe recently, I talked with a gentleman who was in the diplomatic service of one of the Great Powers and was with me in Smyrna at the time that city was burned by the Turkish army. This gentleman was in complete accord with me in all details as to that affair, and asserted that his Foreign Office had warned him to keep silent as to the real facts at Smyrna, but that he had written a full memorandum on the subject, which he hopes to publish.

It is significant that the Turks in 1876 were championed by Jews, while to-day such Jews as Henry Morgenthau, Max Nordau and Rabbi Wise are prominent among that group of men who are raising their voices in behalf of oppressed Christians. It is due to their influence, and to the voices of such senators as King of Utah and Swanson of Virginia, that confirmation of the Lausanne Treaty has been deferred until the blood on the bayonets and axes of the Turks should get a little drier.

Speaking of Disraeli, Gladstone wrote to the Duke of Argyle: “He is not such a Turk as I thought. What he hates is Christian liberty and reconstruction.”

The Bulgarian massacres were made known by an American consular official, and denounced by Gladstone in a famous pamphlet. They led to the declaration of war by Russia, the treaty of San Stefano and the beginning of the freedom of Bulgaria.

In a speech at Blackheath in 1876, Gladstone said:

“You shall retain your titular sovereignty, your empire shall
not be invaded, but never again, as the years roll in their
course, so far as it is in our power to determine, never again
shall the hand of violence be raised by you, never again shall
the flood gates of lust be opened to you.”

In his famous pamphlet, _Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East_, we have the following, a thousand times truer to-day than when it was written:

“Let the Turks now carry away their abuses, in the only
possible manner, namely, by carrying off themselves. Their
Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and Yuzbashis, their
Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage,
shall, I hope, clear out from the province that they have
desolated and profaned. This thorough riddance, this most
blessed deliverance, is the only reparation we can make to
those heaps and heaps of dead, the violated purity alike of
matron and of maiden and of child; to the civilization which
has been affronted and shamed; to the laws of God, or, if you
like, of Allah; to the moral sense of mankind at large. There
is not a criminal in an European jail, there is not a criminal
in the South Sea Islands, whose indignation would not rise and
over-boil at the recital of that which has been done, which
has too late been examined, but which remains unavenged, which
has left behind all the foul and all the fierce passions which
produced it and which may again spring up in another murderous
harvest from the soil soaked and reeking with blood and in the
air tainted with every imaginable deed of crime and shame.
That such things should be done once is a damning disgrace to
the portion of our race which did them; that the door should
be left open to the ever so barely possible repetition would
spread that shame over the world.

“We may ransack the annals of the world but I know not what
research can furnish us with so portentous an example of the
fiendish misuse of the powers established by God for the
punishment of evil doers and the encouragement of them that do
well. No government ever has so sinned, none has proved itself
so incorrigible in sin, or which is the same, so impotent in
reformation.”

Turkish war governor of Smyrna.]

The time will never come when the words of Gladstone, one of the wisest of English statesmen, will be considered unworthy of serious attention. The following characterization of the Turk by him has been more aptly verified by the events that have happened since his death than by those that occurred before:

“Let me endeavor, very briefly to sketch, in the rudest outline
what the Turkish race was and what it is. It is not a question
of Mohammedanism simply, but of Mohammedanism compounded
with the peculiar character of a race. They are not the mild
Mohammedans of India nor the chivalrous Saladins of Syria, nor
the cultured Moors of Spain. They were, upon the whole, from
the black day when they first entered Europe, the one great
anti-human specimen of humanity. Wherever they went a broad
line of blood marked the track behind them, and, as far as
their dominion reached, civilization disappeared from view.
They represented everywhere government by force as opposed
to government by law.—Yet a government by force can not be
maintained without the aid of an intellectual element.—Hence
there grew up, what has been rare in the history of the world,
a kind of tolerance in the midst of cruelty, tyranny and
rapine. Much of Christian life was contemptuously left alone
and a race of Greeks was attracted to Constantinople which has
all along made up, in some degree, the deficiencies of Turkish
Islam in the element of mind.”

To these words of Gladstone may appropriately be added the characterization of the Turk by the famous Cardinal Newman:

“The barbarian power, which has been for centuries seated in
the very heart of the Old World, which has in its brute clutch
the most famous countries of classical and religious antiquity
and many of the most fruitful and beautiful regions of the
earth; and, which, having no history itself, is heir to the
historical names of Constantinople and Nicaea, Nicomedia and
Cæsarea, Jerusalem and Damascus, Nineva and Babylon, Mecca
and Bagdad, Antioch and Alexandria, ignorantly holding in its
possession one half of the history of the whole world.”

In another passage Newman describes the Turk as the “great anti-Christ among the races of men.”