statements made; and I was perfectly justified in saying that the information which had reached us did not justify these statements, and therefore we believed them to be exaggerated.... Lord Derby telegraphed to Sir Henry Elliot that it was very important that Her Majesty's Government should be able to reply to the inquiries made in Parliament respecting these and other statements, and directed Sir Henry Elliot to inquire by telegram of the Consuls, and report as soon as he could. All these statements are untrue. There never were forty maidens locked up in a stable and burnt alive. That was ascertained with great care by Mr. Baring, and I am surprised that the right hon. gentleman the member for Bradford should still speak of it as a statement in which he has confidence. I believe it to be an entire fabrication. I believe also it is an entire fabrication that 1,000 young women were sold in the market as slaves. We have not received the slightest evidence of a single sale, even in those journals on which the right hon. gentleman the member for Bradford founded his erratic speech. I have been attacked for saying that I did not believe it was possible to have 10,000 persons in prison in Bulgaria. So far as I can ascertain from the papers, there never could have been more than 3,000. As to the 10,000 cases of torture, what evidence is there of a single case of torture? We know very well that there has been considerable slaughter; that there must have been isolated and individual cases of most atrocious rapine, and outrages of a most atrocious kind; but still we have had communications with Sir Henry Elliot, and he has always assumed from what he knew that these cases of individual rapine and outrage were occurring. He knew that civil war there was carried on under conditions of brutality which, unfortunately, are not unprecedented in that country; and the question is whether the information we had justified the extravagant statements made in Parliament, which no one pretends to uphold and defend.... The hon. and learned member (Sir W. Harcourt) has done full justice to the Bulgarian atrocities. He has assumed as absolutely true everything that criticism and more authentic information had modified, and in some cases had proved not merely to be exaggeration but to be absolute falsehoods. And then the hon. and learned gentleman says--"By your policy you have depopulated a province." Well, sir, certainly the slaughter of 12,000 individuals, whether Turks or Bulgarians, whether they were innocent peasants or even brigands, is a horrible event which no one can think of without emotion. But when I remember that the population of Bulgaria is 3,700,000 persons, and that it is a very large country, is it not a most extravagant abuse of rhetoric to say that the slaughter of so considerable a number as 12,000 is the depopulation of a province? Well, the hon. and learned gentleman said also that Her Majesty's