Unceasing as earth's ceaseless waves By man's dark dreary road; Earth's darkest fountains cleansing The deep sea hath its music, Its dirge o'er treasured forms, The white-sailed bark flies home, And songs of expectation Float joyous o'er the foam. Deep in the fontal ocean Lies many a precious spoil; But, from the font arising Enters the realms of love. ACCIPITER. THE RHODOPE REFUGEES. ALL authorities agree that the Christian populations of Roumelia and Bulgaria were the most industrious and thriving of the agricultural inhabitants. They were plundered by the Circassian settlers, and by the Turkish police and tax-gatherers, and their wives and children were liable to be carried away to Turkish harems; they lived among an armed Mahometan population, and they were permitted to carry no weapon of defence, but they barred their doors and windows, and kept their wives and children indoors as much as possible, and still worked on and prospered by frugality; while their Turkish neighbour, when he could procure the means, drank strong coffee by the pint, and smoked all day, leaving his family in rags and semi-starvation. The Christians longed for schools, and pinched themselves to give their children some education, but where were the schoolmasters and books to be found? for the Turks sternly prohibited the sale of books in the Bulgarian dialect, or of the New Testament; and a bookseller who endeavoured to start a shop for that purpose in Salonica, was obliged by the authorities to close it. The Epistle of S. Paul could not be sold or procured by the people at large in the very city to which it was addressed; yet a schoolmistress was brought, at much expense, from Bohemia, and the priests obtained their education in Russia. An English traveller, some years ago, in these parts, was much struck by the pleasure with which one or two New Testaments he had for sale, were bought by the people, and how eagerly he was asked if he had not more. American and Scottish missionaries have been permitted to settle in Eski-Zagra, and near Constantinople, to try and convert the Bulgarians to Protestantism, although death to the convert and expulsion to the missionary was the penalty of a conversion from Mahometanism; for the Turks knew well the advantage politically of dividing a part of the nation from its fellows, and they also hoped that it was a step towards Mahometanism, whereas they have very rarely obtained a convert from the members of Eastern Catholicism. We may mention here in passing that Petko, who for years has been a ferocious brigand, was once a highly respectable inhabitant of Salonica, but a Turkish pasha carried off some of the female members of his family, and he has ever since vowed vengeance against every Mabometan. The spiritual starvation to which the Christians in Turkey have been subjected by their government is likely enough to develope characters such as the Jewish captives in Assyria who sang the 137th Psalm, rather than the patient and forgiving followers of the New Testament. Their position has been similar to that of the children of Israel in Egypt, and like those Hebrews they have been evil entreated for four hundred years. Such was the state of things when the massacre of 1876 took place, and the circumstances being fully investigated by Mr. Baring and other commissioners, it was decided by the European Powers that certain reforms and guarantees to prevent such excesses for the future should be demanded from the Turkish government, but the Sultan and his ministers threw away the last opportunity of preserving their empire in its integrity, and preferred to accept the chances of war. For many months after the outbreak of hostilities between Turkey and Russia, the inevitable cost of war, and far more than the usual amount of suffering it entails, fell on the Christian population of Turkey. A Colonel in the Turkish service wrote in October, 1877, "their arabas, bullocks, and they themselves to drive them, are requisitioned for months together; their cattle are taken to feed the army, their hay and barley to feed the horses of the cavalry, . . . the government. . . are daily by their treatment of the loyal, showing what the rebels may expect if they return to their loyalty. It is the fashion just now to run down the wretched Bulgarian, but I pity him from my soul. He has four hundred years of oppression written on his hardened face." (Russell and the other newspaper correspondents during the Crimean War describe exactly the same state of things in 1854.) The Colonel pitched his tent in a Bulgarian farmyard, and found the woman who owned it in bitter trouble. "I was told that her husband had been taken by the authorities, and was in prison in Philippopolis. He was probably at that moment hanging from one of the gibbets we had seen, for it is a short shrift they get, and to be suspected I fancy is to be condemned." The pass of Eski-Zagra he found "literally strewn with bodies of dead Bulgarians," among them a great many women horribly treated. This province, as we have heard from a Scottish eye-witness, was the scene of a second massacre almost equalling that of 1876. A detachment of Russians under General Gourko crossed the Balkans, and took possession of the town of Eski-Zagra, and while they were there the same eye-witness stated that order was preserved; the chief Bulgarians were formed into a municipality, and the life, freedom, and property of all classes, including Jews and Mahometans, were perfectly safe, but the Russian vanguard being unsupported, it was obliged to retreat. Some of the Bulgarians followed it, but others hoping that as they had never borne arms, the colony of American and Scottish missionaries who remained there would be a sufficient protection, stayed behind. The Turkish army entered, preceded by the Circassians and Turkish irregulars, and the place was quickly converted into a howling wilderness. No opposition was offered to the Turks, but they slaughtered indiscriminately Christian and Mahometan, and the wives and children of the missionaries were only saved by some foreign officers in the Turkish service at the risk of their own lives. At the same time the Mahometan villagers to the south of the Balkans were supplied with arms and ammunition, and under the name of Bashibazouks (i.e. rascals) they carried on the work of massacre and pillage. Consul Fawcett himself wrote on August 25, 1877, "When Suleiman Pasha arrived in the Tundja valley he hung every Bulgarian he could catch. The Bashi-bazouks and Circassians are carrying on the work of reprisals in their own blood-thirsty manner." This was upon the women and children, and on some of the Mahometans; for as we have been told by two very different witnesses, all the Christian native male population were sentenced to death by Suleiman's orders, and 1,500 were hung, the rest escaping to the mountains. With the cunning which has always characterized the Turks, they tried to alienate the sympathies of Europe from the Bulgarian cause by reporting barbarities on the part of the Russians and native Christians, and suppressing telegrams from Constantinople or Adrianople which contradicted them, but Mr. Fawcett has since learned that the Mahometan population were not molested by the native Christians, that on the contrary "they feel gratitude to them in many instances, for many among them owe their liberty or their life to the intervention of these latter." They even (Mr. Fawcett reports) declared, that alleged atrocities by the Bulgarians in the Tundja valley had been committed, not by Bulgarians, but by Cossacks disguised as Bulgarians. Now the Cossacks are provided with a uniform, of which they are very proud, by the Russian government; some of them are in scarlet, and it is highly improbable that they would disguise themselves in a Turkish dress even to commit atrocities; for the Bulgarian dress resembles the Turkish so strongly, that one of the Red Cross doctors could only identify the body of a murdered driver as a Bulgarian, (not a Turk, as the Mahometans had declared him to be,) by finding on him the little silver cross, which in the Eastern Church is put round the neck at Baptism; and the Bulgarian legion who crossed the Danube with the Russians were fired upon more than once in mistake for Turks. But the Circassians and Bashi-bazouks provide their own clothes, and after a victory, attired themselves in the clothes of the dead Bulgarians and dead Russians, so that an English officer with the Turkish army wrote home that he was in constant danger of mistaking them for the enemy, which indeed they were during the battles at the Shipka Pass, when a Turkish regiment fired on a long-coated, high-booted, flat-capped crew, supposing them to be Russians, and killed many of their own irregulars. Another English officer questioned a Turkish woman, who had been much injured in a village which the Russians had not then visited, as to the costume of her persecutors, whom she declared to be "Moskovs," i.e. Russians, and she at once described the dress of the Turkish Circassians such as no part of the Russian army now wears; for the Circassians were as completely aliens to the Mahometans of European Turkey as to the Christians, and there is little doubt that they were the " Cossacks disguised as Bulgarians." The "Times" correspondent wrote from the Turkish camp at the Shipka Pass, August 22, 1877, "Robbers from all parts of the Turkish empire hang on to the rear of the regular army, doing no fighting, only robbing and marauding. These irregulars are distinctly here to rob, and murder, to devastate the land, trample the crops, slaughter the old, do worse with the young, and defile the churches in the most ostentatious and revolting manner. Their enormities render them unfit to live, and they have sown a seed of hatred among the people, who after all, though numbers may be massacred, must come again to occupy the land, which will bear fruit to remote generations. The smoke from all the villages at the base is going up in a great cloud, and the Circassians and Bashibazouks are plundering and murdering." Again, the correspondent of the "Times" from another district writes, "The active Turkish population is armed, and looking on Bulgarians as enemies, begins to massacre and slaughter wherever they feel inclined, aided by bloodthirsty villains armed and let loose by the Turkish government;" and we might fill a pamphlet with similar illustrations. Poor Dr. Meyrick is not alive to relate how he was fired at by a Circassian at Kara-atli when he was assisting to bring out of the church the bodies of 175 murdered women and children, shockingly mutilated in the very mode described by some of the Rhodope refugees, and how the Turkish irregulars were slaughtering around the village while this brave man was dressing the wounds of thirty-six women and children, ten of whom were murdered before he could see them again. There was a Turkish woman among them. At Yeni-Zagra and Gaula Mahaliseé there were similar scenes, all recognised to be the work of the Circassians and Bashi-bazouks. The Turkish officers, composed of outlaws and exiles from all Europe, seem to have had little influence over their men, or at any rate did not exercise it to any effect; and their government, for more reasons than one, tried to attribute these massacres to the Russians and Bulgarians, as it gave them the pretext they wanted, to try and diminish the Christian population as much as possible, and to take possession of their lands. The Turkish officials at Shumla forged the names of several foreign and English newspaper correspondents to a |