A very thin House attended to hear the debate which
Mr. Ashley raised on Friday week on the Bulgarian atrocities, but it was an important debate. It will help men to ascertain their own real opinions. Mr. Forster, while severely condemning Sir Henry Elliot for misleading the Government, showed in a masterly speech that the Porte bad deliberately intended to terrorise the province, and with a courage hitherto wanting to English statesmen, boldly faced the real situation, and hoped that if we stood aside and neglected our duty Russia would intervene, and march in troops without opposition from the Government of Great Britain. Sir William Harcourt followed in the same strain, and "hoped to God that we had done with the Turks," described the Porte as a "despotism tempered by assassination and maintained by massacre," and ridiculed with just scorn the despatch in which Lord Derby tells the Constantinople Pashas that if they persist in their cruelties the "indignation of Europe would become uncontrollable," but never threatens English pun- ishment, and in a splendid peroration declared that European opinion would "bear up those who redeemed Christendom from the shame with which she had been too long dishonoured."
