Gladstone, W. E. (William Ewart), 1809-1898; Great Britain -- History -- 19th century -- Sources
What we have to guard against is imposture--that Proteus with a
thousand forms. A few months ago the new Sultan served the turn,
and very well. Men affirmed that he must have time. And now another
new Sultan is in the offing. I suppose it will be argued that he
must have time too. Then there will be, perhaps, new constitutions;
firmans of reforms; proclamations to commanders of Turkish armies,
enjoining extra humanity. All these should be quietly set down as
simply zero. At this moment we hear of the adoption by the Turks of
the last and most enlightened rule of warfare--namely, the Geneva
Convention. They might just as well adopt the Vatican Council or
the British Constitution. All these things are not even the oysters
before the dinner. Still worse is any plea founded upon any reports
made by Turkish authority upon the Bulgarian outrages.... I return
to, and I end with, that which is the Omega as well as the Alpha
of this great and most mournful case. An old servant of the Crown
and State, I entreat my countrymen, upon whom far more than perhaps
any other people of Europe it depends, to require, and to insist,
that our Government, which has been working in one direction,
shall work in the other, and shall apply all its vigour to concur
with the other States of Europe in obtaining the extinction of the
Turkish executive power in Bulgaria. 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
their Yuzbachis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag
and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province they have
desolated and profaned. This thorough riddance, this most blessed
deliverance, is the only reparation we can make to the memory of
those heaps on heaps of dead; to the violated purity alike of
matron, 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 a European gaol, there is not a cannibal in the South
Sea Islands, whose indignation would not rise and overboil at the
recital of that which has been done, which has left behind all
the foul and all the fierce passions that 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.
II. COLD WATER FROM DISRAELI.
=Source.=--_Hansard_, Third Series, vol. 231, col. 1,138, August
11, 1876 (Third Reading of the Appropriation Bill; Bulgarian
Atrocities raised).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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