RETROSPECTIVE AND FOREBODING.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 188, 3 November 1876, Page 11

RETROSPECTIVE AND FOREBODING.

++ 'Certain of our contemporaries have published the details of the Bulgarian massacres as given by the correspondent of the \London Daily News,' an able writer, and whose every word bears all too plainly the impress of truth. We abstain from inserting in our columns these dreadful descriptions; they are horrifying in the extreme, and it is impossible to read them without turning sick. It was undoubtedly right to make them known far and wide, but enough, it strikes us, has been -done for this purpose, and further to report their particulars can serve to no good end. "We retain recollections of one other experience alone that resembled that of the loathing excited by the perusal of these frightful accounts; it occurred some twenty years ago when, the mutiny broke out in India. There are many of us who will probably carry the remembrances of the tidings that then reached us to the grave, and some event connected with them may possibly be laid up in the storehouse of our memories as the most painful of our lives ; too painful, perhaps, to be •voluntarily dwelt upon. These things came home to us terribly ; the victims who met so sad a fate were of our race. It might have been even that we had been acquainted with some of them, and had seen them go away from home filled with the hope of returning to spend their decliuing years amongst their friends, if indeed we could say no more than this ; aud, therefore, we vividly realised their suffering* But, although our interest in them was greater, their deaths were not more horrible thau those of the multitudes of unhappy people who have fallen to the fiendish atrocity of the Bashi-Bazouks. The life described as followed by the Bulgarians is attractive ; family affection seems to be strong amongst them ; they are docile and kind-hearted, and anxious to advance themselves in civilisation ; they are, further, favorably spoken of by the neighboring States, to which they are well known, for it is the custom of their men — who are noted for their skill in gui dening — to travel yearly along the course of the Danube, and earn by the cultivation of vegetables a sum of mouey, which they carry back to their families in the winter, and all these facts add to the horror with which we must regard their murderers. Does it not seem a dreadful thing, that an amiable and industrious people should be thus treated at any time 1 Were it only read of in the history of the inroads of the barbarians into the western empire, or the Turkish conquest of the eastern, we should still be revolted at it. It seems almost past endurance to think that it has occurred in the Europe of the nineteenth century, aud that whilst we were engaged in the peaceful avocations of our daily lives such unimaginable horrors were taking place. But yet, on reflection, we are not astonished at this. We have seen a few other examples in recent times of what human nature, uncurbed by Christian principles, is capable of. The deeds of the Commune in aris were quite as heinous, comparatively, for men who had

been reared in the capital of civilisation, as were those of the wild Bashi-Bazouks, to be committed by wretches whose creed taught them that an enemy slain, even though he should be a child unborn, would add to the joys of their Paradise. We tremble at the deeds of the Turkish irregulars, but we are by no means confident that we may not live to see them closely copied in far more prominent localities than Bulgaria, and by men possessing far greater advantages for the acquisition of virtues than the soldiers referred to. There is nothing to prevent this. Human nature unrestrained is capable of anything, and daily is it being sought to weaken the only hand that has power to restrain it — that of the Catholic Church. Progress, or the worship of the world, the flesh and the devil, is being advanced into the place of old occupied by Christianity, and in its wake are following Communism, and all systems that give the rein to every evil passion. We, therefore, fear that not only those who are young, but many, as "well, advanced in years, may live to see the day when blood will flow very plentifully in highly civilised places, for we still hold to the opinion that Europe is on the eve of a general convulsion* and that when it comes it will be terribie indeed.