Yet what were the facts? In the first place, there can be no doubt that Russia, bent on the destruction of Turkey and aggrandisement at her expense, had stirred the Bulgarians into rebellion by means of _agents provocateurs_. Travellers who visited Bulgaria in the years preceding the Russo-Turkish war state that the Bulgarian peasantry were more prosperous than any in Turkey. It is unlikely that they would have risen of their own accord, seeing that they had good reason to be grateful to the Turks, who had come to their rescue when their persecuting Greek fellow-Christians had set themselves to exterminate the Bulgarian Church, language, and nationality. In the next place, it is now realised that the Christians and not the Turks initiated the atrocities. The Bulgarians, when they rose, plundered and burnt the villages of the Turks, committed the most shocking cruelties, and massacred unarmed Moslem men, women, and children. There is good evidence to show that the Turkish regular troops behaved with consideration to the Christian population until their passions were roused by the barbarities committed by the Bulgarians and Russian Cossacks; then indeed the Turks, exasperated by the sufferings of their co-religionists, engaged in terrible reprisals which aroused the indignation of the civilised world. Ferocious when provoked by the cruelty of others, the Turks are the last people to engage in wanton cruelty, and those who like myself have seen their armies in time of war can vouch for their humane treatment of prisoners and of the civil population in an enemy’s country. It must be remembered, too, that the worst atrocities proved against the Turks in Bulgaria were committed not by Turkish regulars but by fanatical Circassians and by the Bashi-Bazouks, ill-disciplined irregulars recruited from the criminals and ne’er-do-wells of any races, detested by the Turks themselves for their excesses.