"Is it true that the Russian authorities do not permit the Mohammedans to leave the Tzar's dominion?" I now inquired.
"Yes," said the doctor; "a very few months ago a case came under my own observation. Some Mohammedans wished to leave Russia and escape to Turkey; as they were passing the border-line, a band of Cossacks fired upon them. They continued their flight, but three children had been wounded and were afterwards treated in the hospital at Kars."
As I copy the above lines from my note-book, I cannot help thinking of some few Clergymen of the Church of England who, secretly hankering after the superstitions attached to the Greek faith, put themselves forward as champions of Holy Russia. But we need not be surprised. Those people who are so deadened to a sense of right and wrong as to imagine that they are doing God service by instilling into the ears of our wives and children sentences from the foul pamphlet entitled "The Priest in Absolution," can readily bring themselves to believe that killing pregnant women,[19] and flogging Christian women and children,[20] to make them change their religion, is justifiable on the part of the Russian Government. Priests like these would gladly re-establish the Inquisition in our midst. They could defend the massacres of St. Bartholomew, if the victims had been Mohammedans; and on the seventh day of the week they stand up in their pulpits and preach the doctrine of peace by advocating the extermination of the Turks.
The above-mentioned way of treating Mohammedan little children is no novelty on the part of the Tzar's soldiery. Colonel Lake, in his work, the "Defence of Kars," remarks that, "brought up as savages from their infancy, some of these Cossacks will not scruple to commit the most barbarous actions. As an instance of this, on one occasion, during the earlier period of the blockade, a party of them made a dash at a small village by the river side called Karaba Kilissa, and though the inhabitants offered not the slightest opposition to them, they beat a little boy, twelve years of age, very cruelly with their whips, and finally shot him—the ball passing through his thigh and breaking the bone. It was heart-rending to see the poor old mother weeping over her dying child. He was packed up in an araba, or country cart, and sent down to the hospital, where he was attended by Dr. Sandwith. Every possible care was taken of the little sufferer, but he died under the amputation of the shattered limb.
We were told a few months ago by the Right Hon. Robert Lowe, M.P., that Russia was the father of the fatherless; judging from the way she has treated these Mohammedan children, it would not put her to much expense to provide for a numerous family.
It was a goodly spectacle this Holy Russia putting herself forward last autumn as the Champion of the Bulgarians, after she had done her best to foment[21] the disturbances which led to the massacres in their country. It may be refreshing to some of the believers in Muscovite philanthropy if I recall to their recollection what took place very recently in Central Asia.
"Kill the Turkomans, kill them all!" was General Kauffmann's order during the Khivan campaign.
"I suppose you mean in the Circassian style," was the dry remark of an old colonel, well acquainted with the Russian manner of making war upon the Circassians.
"Yes; kill them all! Spare neither age nor sex! Let none escape!"
Circassian[22] pregnant women cut to pieces!—does this go for nothing in the eyes of those gentlemen who called out for vengeance on the Circassians in Bulgaria? Circassian children butchered by Russian soldiery!—is this nothing to two clergymen of the Church of England, who denounced in the strongest language an imaginary atrocity of the Turks?