Fight Servia and Montenegro

They would never have been able to fight Servia and Montenegro, and at the same time to keep up their communications through a hostile country that was up in arms against them. This is, in my mind, the best evidence that there was no organized insurrection throughout the country; for if there had been, it would have succeeded.

All the people of Panagurishti seem to have finally engaged in the revolt, for Raika informed me that even the women had gone out and worked on the fortifications, so great was the enthusiasm, and that they worked at them nine or ten days. I afterwards had occasion to inspect those amateur fortifications when I went there with Mr. Schuyler.

They consisted simply of slight embankments thrown up across two of the roads leading to the village on hills between one and two miles away. The ditch was about a foot or eighteen inches deep, and five or six feet wide, and the embankment, or loose earth, three or four feet high, and not more than four or five feet wide at the bottom, would not have stopped a three-pound shell. It would have afforded convenient cover for pickets or a skirmish line, but was utterly useless for anything else. It would have been equally useless had it been a well-constructed fort Sightseeing Turkey; for the village was so accessible from all sides, that infantry -would not be obliged to advance by the road, and the works would be turned.

The ten days during which they were throwing up this puny earthwork did not pass without some incidents. In the first place, two tax-collectors, who approached the place, were ordered to deliver up their arms, and upon their refusal to do so were fired upon and killed. These tax-collectors were not, properly speaking, officers of the Government, but rather agents of the tax farmer, who had excited the hatred of the people by their extortions.

Fight Servia and Montenegro

They would never have been able to fight Servia and Montenegro, and at the same time to keep up their communications through a hostile country that was up in arms against them. This is, in my mind, the best evidence that there was no organized insurrection throughout the country; for if there had been, it would have succeeded.

All the people of Panagurishti seem to have finally engaged in the revolt, for Raika informed me that even the women had gone out and worked on the fortifications, so great was the enthusiasm, and that they worked at them nine or ten days. I afterwards had occasion to inspect those amateur fortifications when I went there with Mr. Schuyler.

They consisted simply of slight embankments thrown up across two of the roads leading to the village on hills between one and two miles away. The ditch was about a foot or eighteen inches deep, and five or six feet wide, and the embankment, or loose earth, three or four feet high, and not more than four or five feet wide at the bottom, would not have stopped a three-pound shell. It would have afforded convenient cover for pickets or a skirmish line, but was utterly useless for anything else. It would have been equally useless had it been a well-constructed fort Sightseeing Turkey; for the village was so accessible from all sides, that infantry -would not be obliged to advance by the road, and the works would be turned.

The ten days during which they were throwing up this puny earthwork did not pass without some incidents. In the first place, two tax-collectors, who approached the place, were ordered to deliver up their arms, and upon their refusal to do so were fired upon and killed. These tax-collectors were not, properly speaking, officers of the Government, but rather agents of the tax farmer, who had excited the hatred of the people by their extortions.

Mudir or Turkish governor

There was no Mudir, or Turkish governor, in the village at this time, so they had matters all to themselves, and nobody to interfere with them. They immediately proceeded to fortify the place, and they do not seem to have had any other plan for the insurrection than that of waiting quietly in the village, and defending it against all comers.

This seems to have been the plan adopted in the three or four villages where a rising really took place; and a more foolish one could hardly have been imagined. Instead of young men in each village forming themselves into flying bands, and traversing the country in every direction, destroying the railways, cutting the telegraphs, surprising small posts of Turkish soldiers, and avoiding contact with large bodies of troops, each of these villages having thrown off the Turkish authority in the manner above described, adopted the mad plan of defending itself separately and singly against the regular troops.

This, together with the fact that the rising only occurred in three or four- places, and not simultaneously in these, would seem to indicate that the members of the Bucharest Committee were very raw hands at organizing an insurrection, and that their organization was very imperfect, if indeed there were anything like organization at all Sightseeing Turkey.

They seem to have persuaded these three or four villages to rise, hoping that the rest of the country would follow the example, and that there would be a general insurrection as a matter of course. But the rest of the population, without leaders and without organization, remained inactive, and allowed themselves to be quietly slaughtered. There is little doubt, in my mind, that if the rising had been general, properly organized and provided with leaders, the Turks would have been obliged to abandon the whole country north of the Balkans, and withdraw to Adrianople.

Children and grandchildren

They were of all ages, from eighteen up to eighty ; young mothers with children in their arms and two or three hanging to their skirts ; middle-aged women who had grown-up sons and daughters that had fallen under the sharp edge of the sword ; old grandmothers with children and grandchildren all swept away at one fell swoop.

They all told their stories with sobs and tears, beating their heads and wringing their hands in despair. And they were starving and houseless. We could not relieve their misery. We could only listen to their stories with saddened faces, and tell them to hope for better times, and promise to do something for them, if possible, when we should return to Constantinople. Vain hopes, and, I fear, vainer promises.

TATAR BAZARDJIK, August 2.

Since my letter of yesterday I have sapped full of horrors. Nothing has yet been said of the Turks that I do not now believe; nothing could be said of them that I should not think probable and likely. There is, it would seem, a point in atrocity beyond which discrimination is impossible, when mere comparison, calculation, measurement, are out of the question, and this point the Turks have already passed. You can follow them no further Daily Tours Istanbul.

The way is blocked up by mountains of hideous facts, beyond which you cannot see and do not care to go. You feel that it is superfluous to continue measuring these mountains and deciding whether they be a few feet higher or lower, and you do not care to go seeking for molehills among them. You feel that it is time to turn back ; that you have seen enough.

But let me tell what we saw at Batak:—We had some difficulty in getting away from Pestera. The authorities were offended because Mr. Schuyler refused to take any Turkish official with him, and they ordered the inhabitants to tell us there were no horses, for we had here to leave our carriages and take to the saddle. But the people were so anxious we should go, that they furnished horses in spite of the prohibition, only bringing them first without saddles, by way of showing how reluctantly they did it.

Subjected for Centuries

The truth is, that no other people in the world but these Bulgarians would stand for a day the exactions, extortions, oppression, and tyranny to which they have been subjected for centuries. If it were attempted to introduce into England the system of taxation in use here, the people would rise as one man against the Government. Why, then, should we so blame these poor Bulgarians for doing that which we all would do under like circumstances ; why sympathise with the strong against the weak, when the weak are so evidently in the right ?

PESTERA, August 1.

The task which has been set Mr. Baring and Mr. Schuyler is not an enviable one. They have both gone to work in the most earnest manner, and are visiting all the principal towns and villages that were burnt by the Bashi-Bazouks, in order to see with their own eyes the ruin that has been worked, and to hear with their own ears the stories of the villagers.

This necessitates travelling from five to fifteen hours a day over roads the best of which are nearly impassable for carriages, beneath a burning sun, rendered almost insupportable by the close sultry atmosphere of August. Mr. Baring has already been ill twice, owing to over-exertion, hard work, and the overpowering heat; and even Mr. Schuyler Daily Tours Istanbul, inured to the fatigue of this kind of work by his long journey through Turkestan, seemed to find it as much as he could stand.

But the hard work and the heat, and the wearisome round of. investigation, of questions repeated over and over again, of listening to the same sort of stories told a hundred times over, of sifting and comparing evidence, would be nothing, and might be easily borne.

Mr. Baring and Mr. Schuyler

It is the heart-rending cries of despair that shake you, the crowds of weeping women and children that meet and follow us everywhere—women and children, poor trembling creatures, who are homeless and starving—widows and orphans who are weeping for husbands and fathers slain, and who have not a roof to shelter them, nor bread for the morrow. It is this that makes the task that has been set Mr. Baring and Mr. Schuyler one which they will hardly care to ever undertake again.

We have just passed through the village of Raddovo on our way here, where we stop for the night before continuing to-morrow to Batak. Raddovo was apparently a very flourishing little place, and, to tell the truth, it has suffered less, perhaps, than the majority of the towns that were left to the tender care of the Bashi-Bazouks. It was a village of 160 houses, of which not one is left standing, and the inhabitants are now living under sheds of straw, constructed in nooks and corners of the black and crumbling wralls. They gathered around us when we stopped in the middle of the once flourishing place, and timidly told us their story.