Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 135.pdf/660

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RUSSIANS, TURKS, AND BULGARIANS.
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on the estate of an Irish absentee landlord, bound to dismount when encountering a Turk on the road, just as a rural inferior at home is virtually bound to touch his hat to his local superior; but withal prospering mightily. The recently imported Circassians are a thorn in their flesh, against whom they have to put up iron bars and keep numerous fierce dogs, precautions which do not always avail; but the Circassian nuisance may be "squared" by judicious occasional presents of poultry and farm produce to the moullah of the district. The Bulgarian population, it is true, are debarred from aspiring to any, even the meanest public function, not even having the distinguished privilege, so much prized by the business Englishman, of being summoned on a jury when private avocations are exceptionally engrossing. To judge by the manner in which the Bulgarian civic functionaries appointed by Prince Tcherkasky are presently fulfilling their duties, from the municipal councillor who is making haste to be rich by pillaging alike casual Russian and resident countryman, to the street policeman of Tirnova or Gabrova, who, clothed in a little brief authority, whacks about him indiscriminately with his ratan, it may be questioned whether the general progress of the world was seriously retarded by the enforced abstention of the Bulgarians from a share in the management of public affairs.

It was no doubt a sad thing that the stalwart manhood of the Bulgarians was debarred from proving in the defence of the country that it had a heart in keeping with its thews and sinews, although circumstances may inspire a doubt whether the iron of this prohibition ate deeply into the Bulgarian heart. The country was badly governed, or rather in effect it was hardly governed at all, and this is exactly the state of things in which the astute man who knows the trick of buying protection is sure to get on by no means badly. I do not mean to say that it was all smooth and pleasant for the Bulgarians, or indeed for any of the races of which the population of Turkey in Europe is made up; but their lot, from all I have been able to learn, was tolerable enough. It seems to have been a lot for which the practical British philanthropist would gladly see a considerable section of his fellow country-people exchange their own wretched, sodden, hopeless plight. The life of the Bulgarian was eminently preferable to that of the miserable victims of the "sweater " who exist rather than live in Whitechapel garrets. I think Devonshire Giles, with his nine shillings a week and a few mugs of cider, would cheerfully have put up with the zaptieh, exclusion from a share in the management of public affairs — although his home share of that privilege is so large and so highly prized — and would have even been resigned under the dispensation of debarment from military service, for the sake of the rich acres of pasture and barley land, the cattle and brood mares of the rural Bulgarian. I know that the Russian peasant soldier who has crossed the Danube as the "deliverer" of the Bulgarian from "oppression” feels with a stolid, bewildered envy that, to use a slang phrase, he would be glad indeed "to have half his complaint."

The times, no doubt, had a certain roughness, and occasionally there were Bulgarians who could not accept the roughs with the smooths, and who kicked against the pricks. There have been Irishmen who have manifested active discontent with the rule of the "hated Saxon," and who have been made to suffer for their peculiar way of looking at things. The discontented Bulgarians sometimes were sent to prison, but mostly escaped into neutral territory without undergoing this infliction; and wherever they found themselves — in Bucharest, in Galatz, up among the hills at Cronstadt, or down in the flat at Crajovo or Turn Severin — there they seduously plotted against the Turkish dominance over the Bulgaria from which they were exiles. I suppose they had a perfect right to do this, and to strive to implicate in their plots their brethren who still remained "oppressed," if prosperous: only the man who plots and the man who joins a plot must, like the man who speculates, be prepared to take the consequences of failure.

As for the argument that the Turks were new-comers and have no abiding places in European Turkey, but that their tenure there is but the empire of superior power — if that is to be admitted and acted on, there logically follows a revolution in the face of the world, and all but universal chaos. We must quit India, and bid an apologetic adieu to the Maori, the Kaffir, and the Hottentot, the Spaniard from whom we wrested Gibraltar, the Dutchman from whom we masterfully took the Cape. We are to take ship from the jetties over which frown the Heights of Abraham, and leave the French habitants and the remnant of red men left at Cachnawaga to settle between them the ownership of Canada East. Poland must