in Poland.

humane as a nation, but whether their system of government is not such as to render it impossible to trust them as allies in any undertaking for the purpose of preventing inhumanity in others.

Next, it would be a great mistake to view the cruelties committed in committed in Turkistan as a

solitary instance of Russian oppression. In Poland, in the Baltic provinces, in Circassiaeverywhere, in fact, where Russia is ruling over alien races-we find the same system pursued

Russian rule with relentless pertinacity. The Poles are not at this moment in revolution, and there is, therefore, no occasion for the perpetration of such horrible deeds as those committed in Turkistan last year. But the following extracts will show how the Poles were treated at the time of their last insurrection. If we substitute Bulgarians for Poles, and Bashi-bazouks for regular Russian troops, we shall find in the acts of Russia in 1863 a striking prototype of those of Turkey in 1876. The quotations are taken from the Times of 1863, where numerous other details of Russian "atrocities" will be found by those who care to look for them :

"Times, February 21, 1863.-They put unarmed men, women, and children to the sword. . . . They put the peaceful inhabitants of the town to the sword after they had routed the insurgents. The Russians do not allow the Poles to bury their slain, as the Grand Duke Constantine has declared that they shall be food for ravens.'

'April 23.- A magistrate named Swiderski thus described what he himself witnessed: "The Imperial troops attacked the house with a hailstorm of shots; I, a quiet inhabitant, being in the house at the time. At length the soldiers entered, killed my daughter with two bayonet stabs, wounded with two shots my son-in-law.. and began to plunder. The Imperial troops, after killing four insurgents, whom we buried, murdering my daughter, and wounding my son-in-law, killed six servants of the household [their names names are given]. The above were first castrated and then twice stabbed with bayonets." [Other outrages are mentioned at the same time.]

"June 24. After the battle of Lubar, the

Adjutant-General Kolsakoff gave orders that the prisoners and the wounded should be buried in the same grave with the dead, and the Russian soldiers readily obeyed the instructions they had received.'

"November 11.-Young ladies are being continually arrested. Fifty, for the most part girls of from seventeen to nineteen years of age, some of them even younger, were taken one night last week, and are now in prison. Old and young, men and women are all treated alike in the matter of arrests, and are invariably seized in the middle of the night. From ten at night till four the next morning are the Russian official hours for deeds that will not bear the light of day."

The above quotations will, it is hoped, suffice to prove that the policy of Russia as a State is the very reverse of a humane one. Even if this were not the case, however, the system of government which she pursues in her own country is such that no true friend of the Turkish Christians can wish that they should be subjected to a similar rule. However disinterested Russia may be assumed to be in her efforts to emancipate

the Southern Slavs from the Ottoman dominion, it cannot be supposed that she would tolerate the grant of more liberal institutions to them than she herself possesses; a free State is a dangerous neighbour to a despotic one, which must always dread the incitement to revolution among its own people produced by the proximity of a nation enjoying greater political liberties than themselves.

sequences to

Christians

If, therefore, the Turkish Christians are to be Probable conemancipated with the help of Russia, that power the Turkish may fairly claim, if not to exercise a direct of Russian influence over their system of government, at in their be

least to prevent it from becoming more liberal than her own. And what is the Russian system of government? That it is a despotism we all know; and this though it would be intolerable to Englishmen would, perhaps, not be regarded as a grievance by the half-civilised populations of the East. But even they would probably protest against the incessant and vexatious interference of Russian officialism in all the affairs of life; the rigid suppression of all manifestations of public opinion which are at variance with the views of the government; the prohibition of the use of their

intervention

half.

own language in public documents and courts of justice; and the almost unlimited arbitrary power of the higher functionaries, who have the lives and properties of the people at their mercy.

It will be interesting to quote on this subject the Pall Mall Gazette of the 21st of February, 1876:

"Another complaint made against the Turkish Government is that there is no security for the property of its Christian subjects. But in Russia the Government has not only failed to afford securities for the property of its Polish subjects, but has carried out a system of wholesale confiscation which is without a precedent in any modern Christian State. Moreover, in Lithuania, Volhynia, and Podolia no Pole or Roman Catholic is permitted to acquire land except by direct inheritance. If he becomes insolvent his landed property is sold by auction; and, as none but Russians can be buyers, and those residing in the provinces in question are usually few in number and poor, the sum realized by the sale