HOLY RUSSIA

Waikato Times, Volume XVIII, Issue 1522, 6 April 1882, Page 4

HOLY RUSSIA

Fhom the Baltic to the Black Sea a suf'faring people physically and intellectually incomparably supe"*ior~ to J the Russians have been the victims of -an outbi eak ot 1 inn ider, rapine, and brutal lust, compared jwith the'deeds doiie in the p'auic-fnry of civil war in Bulgaria pale into relative j innocence. There has been a Saturnalia; 'of slaughter and of debauchery such as I history offers no parallel to,' and it has ' been done with the torekuowlcdgc of, and ( under the eyes of, and with the direct , connivance of the Government officials. 'The soldiers have taken part in the drunken orgies 'of the bestial populace, and the Russian women have held do\vn 1 their more comely Jewish sisters while | the soldiers inflicted upon them the worst lof conceivable indignities. Robbery and lunnamable ruffianism, riot, rapiiie, . murder and spoliation,' have swept over 100 towns and villages ; thousands of families have been rendered homeless, and children of tender years and delicate girls nave been subjected to outrages under which they have died. These deeds were not done under provocation, or in panic, or in the maddening frenzy of civil war. There was no pretence of any plot on the part of the victims, as in Bulgaria; there was no disclosure of an organised conspiracy to bum and massacre, as in Bulgaria ; there was no collusion with an armed enemy, as in Bulgaria ; there was no employment of hastilygathered irregular levies, as in Bulgaria. The riots and massacres were deliberately organised, the time for their development was fixed-^even the Jews knew of them beforehand, and implored protection, but importuned in vain. Families were burnt alive in their own houses, and wives and daughters foully dishonored in the presence of their relatives by soldiers who should have been their protectors. Such is Russia th° civiliser ; such is Russia the the crusader; "Holy Russia;' which converted a prosperous Turkey province into a pandemonium, and which was in this town of Sheffield complimented by Mr Chamberlain on that" work of benevolence." Wheic are the Atrocitists, ? They shall not Lick for facts. The Czar s officials have striven hard to keep the truth from being known, they have put a veto upon telegrams, they have opened and searched through letters, they have torbidden the outraged in one city to forward details to their friends in other cities in Rn.ssia ; but the details are, notwithstnding, . coming to hand in the form of the most horrible reading that has for some centuries appeared in any English newspaper. — lihrfthld Telegraph.

There were sixteen women to one man in Nantucket. It must he an Eden where one man can listen to the conversation of sixteen women at once. A tourist in Switzerland, finding a charge in his bill for stationery, and being sure that he had oidered none, investigated the matter, and learned that the "stationery"' was the ink and paper used in making out the bill. Ox his death-bed a distinguished humourist requested that no one should be invited to his funeral. "Because," sobbed out the dying man, " itis a civility I can never repay." As a mother was arraying her squalling infant in its richest robes, its little brother exclaimed, " If here ain't a fancy diess bawl."