n
of all Slavs under the autocracy of the czar.

At first the uprising attracted little attention; it had occurred
down in southern Rumania, not far from Philippopolis. Nor did its
suppression at first attract notice, until MacGhan, the American
correspondent of an English newspaper, went down to the scene of the
troubles and began sending in reports to his paper, and as the
European public read these descriptions in the British newspaper,
their indignation rose and presently swept all over Europe in a
storm of fury against the Turks.

These were what afterward became known as the Bulgarian atrocities.
The villagers of Batak had been preparing for some days to join the
insurrection when a force of bashi-bazouks, Turkish irregulars,
under the command of Achmet Agha and Mohammed Agha arrived at the
place. On the two Turkish leaders giving their word of honor that no
harm should come to them, the villagers surrendered. No sooner had
they laid down their arms than a general massacre of the whole
population began; not only the men, but women and children were
tortured, outraged, and hacked to pieces. When a British commission
appeared on the scene two months later to investigate, the little
village church was still piled up to the windows with the corpses of
those that had fled there for sanctuary. Skulls with gray hairs
still attached to them, tresses which had once adorned the heads of
young girls, and the rotting limbs of small children were mingled in
one gruesome heap. It is said that the Ottoman High Commissioner,
who was sent by the Turkish Government with the British commission
to investigate, on beholding this sight, turned to one of the
perpetrators who was present and asked him how much Russia had paid
him for a deed which, as he phrased it, would be "the beginning of
the end of the Ottoman Empire." The Turkish Government evidently did
not share this pessimistic view, for it decorated the two Turks who
had led the bashi-bazouks in the massacre.

It presently developed that Batak was not an isolated example. Mr.
Baring of the British commission estimated that the total number of
Bulgars slaughtered in that district during the month of May must
have been 12,000. In Batak 5,000 out of a population of 7,000 had
been killed.

Never was Europe more aroused. Mr. Gladstone's famous pamphlet,
denouncing the Turkish administration in its European provinces,
went through edition after edition. Lord Derby, on behalf of