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 of the Geneva Convention, which they themselves set at naught. Wielding the axe and chopper of ruthless savages, they have acted like a pack of querulous and mendacious old women, in cackling to Europe their trumped-up allegations of violations of civilized warfare on the part of their enemies. They have thus sacrificed the sternly intelligible consistency of an attitude of persistent indomitable barbarism, and have admitted the jurisdiction of a court from whose bar it should have been their policy to stand aloof. This has been one capital error on their part: an error which may cost them infinitely dearer than defiant contumacy would have done.

Their second cardinal error comes within the pale of civilized warfare. Not having chosen to resist in force the Russian crossing of the Danube, and having elected to fall back before the invaders of Bulgaria, it was on the part of the Turks a grave military omission that they did not lay waste the territory which they left open to that invader's occupation. Had the territory been exclusively inhabited by their own people, it would have been none the less a military duty to have destroyed the crops, burnt the villages to the last cottage, and left only desolation behind them. It might have been that some fanatic philanthropists might have clamored of the inhumanity of this line of action; but sensible people would have sorrowfully recognized it as one of the stern necessities of ever-cruel war. The Russians could have uttered no reproach, with the precedent in their own history wrought by Kutusoff, Barclay de Tolly, and Rastapchin. If precedents are wanted of a later date, the American civil war — a war between brethren — swarms with them. If the Turks should have obeyed the demands of a military necessity, had the civilian population been mainly their own people, how much less incumbent on them was it to admit deterrent humanitarian considerations as the case stood! The whole Turkish population was ordered back by a command from Constantinople: there remained only Bulgarians, coreligionists of the invader, notoriously sympathizers with his aims, notoriously disaffected to Turkish rule, sure to become guides, spies, hewers of wood and drawers of water to their "deliverers," willing vendors to these of their substance. To leave behind, instead of reeking desolation, a land flowing with milk and honey, a land swarming with unmolested friends to the invader, was a piece of military lunacy almost unparalleled. The Turks should have driven the Bulgarian population inland before them to the last man, and left extant not a sheaf of barley that could have been destroyed. That they did not do so was the second of the two glaring mistakes I have indicated. When the defects of the Russian supply system are taken into consideration, there is no need to waste space in detailing the certainty, or in speculating on the probabilities, with which desolating tactics were pregnant.

It is no task of mine to inquire why the Turks did not pursue these tactics. It may be said that they did not because of their crassness, their hurry, their carelessness, their lack of military foresight; why suggest further reasons ? But the outcome, as a hard fact, stands that the Bulgarian population, left behind unmolested when the Turks fell back, were spared unheard-of suffering. They were in fact left in full enjoyment of their prosperity, it might be forever, certainly for an indefinite period. I want to know, if the Turks choose to assert that they thus sacrificed themselves and spared the Bulgarians from motives exclusively of pure humanity, on what valid grounds is any one to contradict them? If I find my way into a cellar full of untold gold, and am found coming out with empty pockets, am I not, even were I by habit and repute a thief, entitled to claim that my honesty deterred me from plunder? I have said that the Turks are barbarians, and that they are ruthless savages when their fighting blood is up; but there is no inconsistency between this attribute and the attribute of contemptuous good-natured humanity, or rather perhaps tolerant unaggressiveness, when nothing has occurred to stir the pulse of the savage spirit. And I sincerely believe, on the evidence of my own eyes and ears, that the Turks — the dominant race in virtue of those characteristics which, until the millennium, will ever continue to insure the dominance of a race — allowed the Bulgarians — the subject race in virtue of those characteristics which, while they exist, will always make a race subject to some one or other — to have by no means a bad time of it. Proof of this belief I will adduce in detail when I come to deal with the Bulgarians. But just cast a hasty glance at the conduct of the barbarian Turks during the past two years. The period opens with the Bulgarians, subject indeed to the Turks, taxed, no doubt, heavily and arbitrarily, annoyed occasionally by a zaptieh who must have been nearly as bad as the omnipotent "agent"