June disquieting rumours flew about to the effect that there had been a revolution in Bulgaria, and that the Turks had suppressed it by massacres of the most revolting barbarity. The Government met these tales with jaunty persiflage. On the 10th of July Mr. Forster put a question on the subject, which Mr. Disraeli answered by saying that he considered the reports exaggerated, nor did he think that torture had been resorted to by “an Oriental people who, I believe, seldom resort to torture, but generally terminate their connection with culprits in a more expeditious manner.”[92] This ill-timed jest was hailed with a great guffaw of laughter from the Ministerial Benches. It destroyed Mr. Disraeli’s authority in the country when the awful truth was revealed, not by the diplomatic agents of England, who strove hard to conceal it, but by two American gentlemen, Mr. J. A. Macgahan, a distinguished journalist, and Mr. Eugene Schuyler, the United States Consul-General in Turkey. They went to Philippopolis on the 25th of July, and Mr. Macgahan’s description of what he saw in the country, which had been ravaged by the Turks, when published in the _Daily News_, sent a thrill of horror through the [Illustration: SIR JAMES FALSHAW. (_From a Photograph by J. Moffat, Edinburgh._)] civilised world. The partisans of Turkey were enraged beyond self-control, and vowed that the worst of all outrages that had been committed was that which was perpetrated by the publication of Mr. Macgahan’s report on the brutalities of the Turkish soldiery. The wild work of the Sepoys at Cawnpore was indeed merciful and humane compared with what had been done by the Turks at Batak. Indiscriminate butchery could alone be laid to the charge of the Indian mutineers. But in Bulgaria, before the Turk murdered his victims, he inflicted on them fiendish tortures and bestial outrages. The Province was one vast desolation covered with blackened ruins, devastated fields, putrefying corpses, and bleached skeletons. Neither age nor sex had been spared. The land would have been as silent as a desert, save for the wailing of the scattered remnant of the Christian population who had eluded the vengeance of their oppressors. As for the Porte--whose promises of reform in Bulgaria were cheerily cited by Mr. Disraeli to cast doubt on the descriptions of these atrocities--it gave but one sign of action. It promoted Achmed Aga, the barbarian who was responsible for all this wickedness, to be Governor of the Province which he had laid waste.”[93] The effect of these revelations on public opinion was heightened by Mr. Gladstone’s pamphlet, entitled “Bulgarian Horrors,” and by his speech at Blackheath on the 9th of September, wherein he convicted the Government of apologising for Turkish barbarities, when it could no longer venture to deny their existence. He laid down the lines of the new Eastern policy which England must support. The Turkish