Publisher's Synopsis
An excerpt from the Introduction.
...Six months ago, England and Europe had just learned, upon official authority, the reality and extent of the Massacres, and of the outrages far worse than Massacre, in Bulgaria. Over and above the horrors of the perpetration, there was ground for the darkest surmises as to the seat of the ultimate responsibility for those fiendish crimes. Miscreants, fatally prominent in the proceedings, had been decorated and rewarded; and; the solemn business of retributive inquiry had been visibly tampered with by the Turkish Government, to which we had been lending, through a blood-stained period, our moral and our material support. But the revelation of the facts was still new; and there had not been time sufficient for clearly carrying home the guilt beyond the wretched men, who performed the deeds of blood and shame. The belief that a Government in alliance with Her Majesty could stand in close complicity with crimes, so foul that the very possibility of them seems to lower the level of our nature, was a belief so startling, nay, so horrible, that it was not fit to be entertained, unless upon the clearest and fullest evidence. And all this time we were unblushingly assured, by one if not more of the organs of the Turkish cause in the London Press, that order, momentarily disturbed in Bulgaria by agents from abroad, had been restored, and that life, honour, and property were secure under a calumniated but really paternal Government.
As time has gone on, and facts have gradually emerged, those surmises, which at first floated as thin vapours in the air, have acquired more and more of substance and consistency: and at length the copious, but not too copious, Papers supplied to Parliament have so accumulated the evidence, as to leave no longer any room for reasonable doubt. We have now to confront a fact, more revolting than the fact of the Massacres themselves. The supposition, which I have described as too shocking to be entertained in our state of imperfect knowledge, now stands forth as clear as the lurid light of a furnace against the blackness of a nocturnal sky. Let me try to make entirely plain the issue, which in these pages I desire to raise.
There were separate acts which, in September, it was perhaps possible to construe, by a large indulgence, as referable to weakness, to accident, or to the bewilderment and confusion attendant upon war, in a country which never had any but a military organisation, and which has now lost in the main even that solitary ornament. Such a construction would now be irrational. All the acts, and all the non-acts, of the Turkish Government, before the rising when we knew them scantily, during and since the lamentable scenes, when we know them but too fully, stand forth to view in a dark and fatal consistency. It matters not who was Sultan or who was Vizir. Rushdi was as Mahmoud, and Midhat was as Rushdi, and Edhem thus far is as Midhat. There, is a point of development and ripeness in a series of acts, at which tendency becomes proof of purpose; as there is also a point in the accumulation of evidence, at which not to see guilt is in some measure to share it. When deeds admit of no interpretation but one, that one can no longer be honourably avoided. The acts of the Porte, through nine long months, demonstrate a deliberate intention, and a coherent plan. That purpose has been to cover up iniquity; to baffle inquiry; to reward prominence in crime; to punish or discourage humanity among its own agents; to prolong the reign of terror; to impress with a steady coherency upon the minds of its Mahometan subjects this but too intelligible lesson for the next similar occasion, do it again....
