Such are the people who but recently were spoken of as the “unspeakable Turks.” For thirty years they have suffered from the crudest of tyrannies and have met with but scant sympathy in Western Europe; for it was “their double misfortune,” to quote the words of a writer in the _Times_, “to be oppressed and to be compelled to bear the odium of the cruelty of the oppressor. Their fine qualities were obscured to the world. Their name was a byword for cruelty, violence, and fanaticism.” In England, if one attempted to defend the Turk, one was regarded as a cold-blooded villain by a great many good people. A considerable section of the English lost their sense of fair play so soon as the Turkish question became at the same time a pawn in our party politics and an excitant of religious bigotry; for one political party became avowedly anti-Turkish, while numbers of well-meaning but unjust Christian people approached the subject from the point of view which made a Mussulman appear everything that is vile, and so espoused the cause of Turkey’s Christian enemies as being of necessity the right one. It was the same sort of sectarian narrow-mindedness that impelled well-known preachers—not members of the English State Church to pray from their pulpits for the success of the Americans in their war with Spain, because Spain was Catholic and the “land of the Inquisition.” Thus it came about when Turkey’s Christian subjects rebelled in the seventies and the Russians came to their assistance, the Turks were held up to opprobrium as fiends in human shape, the murderers, violators, and mutilators of the gentle Christians. Any piece of evidence, second-hand or third-hand, however extravagant, was implicitly believed by these people provided it was against the Turks, whereas whenever charges of committing atrocities were brought against Russians and Bulgarians by the most trustworthy eye-witnesses a very different standard of evidence was set up, and it was held to be incredible that Christians could do these things.