them, arm irregular bands from any quarter they can procure them with, likely enough, not sufficient discrimination and examination as to their character, scenes are, no doubt, enacted, and atrocities committed, which every human being, be he Christian or Mahometan, would in cold blood deprecate and deplore. As Sir H. Elliot says: “An insurrection or civil war is everywhere accompanied by cruelties and abominable excesses, and this being tenfold the case in Oriental countries where people are divided into antagonistic creeds and races, the responsibility and sin of those who incite a peaceful province to rise becomes doubly heavy, and they now endeavour to throw them upon others.”[101] Nobody outside Timbuctoo approves or condones cruelties, but the charge against the Ottoman authorities really amounts to their arming and employing irregular troops, Pomaks, Circassians, Gipsies, etc., over whom they could exercise very imperfect control. But as Mehemet Rushdi Pasha told the English Ambassador, “the emergency was so great as to render it indispensable at once to stamp the movement out by any means that were immediately available.”[102] Mehemet Rushdi himself, it will be remembered, only came into office after those acts had been committed. He was consequently in no way responsible, neither he nor Midhat, either for their commission or for the events that led up to them. With reference to the _Daily News_ article on Turkish atrocities, which started the agitation against Turkey in England, Sir H. Elliot, writing on the 25th July 1876, says: “I have reason to believe that the credulity of the correspondent of the _Daily News_, whose letters on the subject of the Bulgarian atrocities attracted so much attention in England, has been imposed upon by two Bulgarian relatives of one of the presumed ringleaders of the revolt, inhabiting Philippopolis. One of these was for a time editor of a Bulgarian journal in Constantinople, and it is evident that information derived from such a source can only be regarded as untrustworthy.”[103] As the very aim and purpose of the insurrection was to create excitement and provoke hatred of the Turk in Europe, it is no wonder if the most monstrous exaggerations passed current as peremptory truths.