Ohio History Journal

228      Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

by assumed super and supra-natural means, but in accordance

with the laws which govern in the every day world of to-day.

The twelve labors of Hercules were not more onerous, nor more

beset with impending perils, than were his efforts in the council

chambers of chancellories and the closets of cabinets, none the

less along nervous lines of gathering armies, in his task of arous-

ing supine Europe to the point of stamping out the nameless

atrocities being heaped upon the people of a helpless principality.

His unattained and interdicted ride from the headquarters

of the Russian army to Khiva, in open defiance of the orders

of the grim commander, with drumhead court martial and sum-

mary execution, as the alternative of disobedience, has no par-

allel in classic literature, where poetic imagination supplies every

gap in the continuity of events.

The final rounding out of his life's mission, the deliverance

of the Principality of Bulgaria from the merciless hand of the

Moslem Spoiler, is one of the established facts in the nineteenth

century history, more heroic, more knightly, more god-like, in

every respect than the fabled achievement of Perseus in rescuing

Andromeda, the daughter of the king of Ethiopia, from the

greedy jaws of the Sea Monster.

Our Perry county Knight was indeed a hero; one, without

fear and without reproach.

A BULGARIAN'S TRIBUTE TO MACGAHAN.

By Svetozar Tonjoroff.

To a Bulgarian the name of MacGahan is fraught with

memories that stir the soul and send the blood coursing faster

through the veins. For MacGahan was the first champion of

an oppressed people before the world's tribunal. It was MacGa-

han who, in the Bulgarian revolution against savage tyranny in

1876, closed the lying mouths of British diplomats and British

bondholders, thirsty for the payment of maturing Turkish cou-

pons, by placing the damning facts of Turkish misrule before

the collective conscience of the English-speaking races. It was

a service which the Bulgarians will never forget so long as

history lasts.

The MacGahan Monument.                229

My countrymen first saw the famous son of New Lexington

in 1876. In that year Turkish bestialities had reached such a

pitch of ferocity in the province of Bulgaria that a people of

infinite patience had been goaded into open revolt. There are

moments in the lives of nations, as in the lives of individuals,

when death is preferable to the continued torture of existence.

Such a moment had arrived in the history of the Bulgarians,

once masters of the Balkan Peninsula. The revolution of 1876

began in the hot blood of resentment, without preparation. The

Bulgarian peasant, under the hoof-beats of the wild Circassians,

imported in hordes into Bulgaria for the express purpose of

stamping out the last spark of spirit in its children, took up his

pitchfork and his goad in self-defense. He revolted in much

the same spirit in which the minute man of the American col-

onies, exactly a century earlier, had seized his flintlock to repel

aggressions much less grievous than those that threatened the

Bulgarians.

With the aid of fanatic forces which Turkey poured into

the revolted territory from Asia Minor, the revolution was put

down and the pacification was begun in characteristic Turkish

fashion. It was at this period that MacGahan came to Bulgaria

as the special correspondent of the London Daily News. It was

then that he began the work of unmasking the lie which the Brit-

ish foreign office, subservient to the banking interests that de-

manded the pound of flesh from the vitals of a starving peasantry,

had set up before the world.

"There are no Turkish atrocities," was the dictum of Dis-

raeli, whose memory is forever accursed in Bulgaria. "The

revolution is being put down with unexampled gentleness. The

Bulgarians are a turbulent lot who must be crushed for the sake

of the peace of the world."

Your distinguished fellow-townsman arrived at the shambles

to determine by observation whether the cry of the Bulgarians

was a mere theatrical exclamation uttered for political effect,

or whether Disraeli, with volumes of official reports from the

seat of the atrocities snugly stowed away in the pigeonholes of

the foreign office, was deliberately perverting the facts in order

230       Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

to help his great and good friend the unspeakable Turk. And

this is what MacGahan found:

The Turks had carried out the spirit of their religion in a

series of massacres that capped the climax of even Turkish

savagery. One instance will suffice to illustrate the conditions

throughout the pacified territory which MacGahan, the patron

saint of Bulgaria, disclosed. It is the case of Batak, where the

entire village population of between three and four thousand men,

women and children, had sought refuge in the large village church

from the humane methods of the Turkish pacifiers. The church

was surrounded by regular troops and Bashi-Bozouks. After

a siege of several days the Turkish commander offered free

pardon to the besieged if they would surrender their arms. The

terms were accepted for the sake of the women, the little chil-

dren and the helpless old men. When the last flintlock had

been handed out to the troops a bugle call was sounded, a stream

of kerosene played upon the church, and soon a match had set

the structure ablaze in every part, a funeral pyre worthy of

Disraeli and his humane allies in the extermination of a Christian

people whose only crime was their refusal to surrender their

faith and to coin the sweat of their labors into usurious interest

for pampered British bondholders. And this is what MacGahan

found in that church: An entire village population burned to

ashes-little children with their mothers; palsied old age and

powerless youth and manhood, all side by side in a horrible

death as a fitting memorial to Turkish savagery backed by Brit-

ish greed. Among the victims was Dimitri Tonjoroff, a kinsman

of the writer, who as village teacher shared the fate of his

pupils in that desecrated temple of the Redeemer.

Yet even in the face of these frightful disclosures, which

MacGahan made in the columns of the Daily News, the smug

diplomats of London maintained their denials with the utmost

hardihood, and your townsman was subjected to bitter attacks

as a perverter of the truth!

To the Bulgarians of the period, surrounded with visible

evidences of the hostility of the great and powerful British

empire, the appearance of MacGahan was like the dawn of

day after a dark night of terror unspeakable. It is recorded in

The MacGahan Monument.                231

the Bulgarian Encyclopedia that MacGahan's last words to his

Bulgarian friends after he left those tragic scenes to return to the

office of his paper were:

"In less than a year you shall see the soldiers of the Czar

here."

History has recorded the accuracy of that prediction. How

much the noble pen of MacGahan contributed to the causes that

determined Alexander II., the Czar-Liberator, to undertake the

sacred task of shattering the chains from the hands of the Bul-

garians by the roar of the Russian cannon, may never be known.

Sufficient it is to say that had not the heartless plot of Disraeli

been exposed by MacGahan's revelations, British prejudice,

forever on the look-out for Russian poaching on British pre-

serves, might have frustrated Russia's move at its very inception.

As it was, the muzzles of the British naval guns were not bared

against the Russians until the standard of the Russian regiments

were at the walls of Constantinople and a liberated nation was

once more breathing God's pure air of liberty after a subjection

lasting through five stifling centuries.

But even while MacGahan was yielding up his life at Con-

stantinople, stricken by the scourge of war, the implacable foe of

the Bulgarians was partly undoing the work which MacGahan

and Alexander II. had wrought. MacGahan was the impas-

sioned advocate of the Great Bulgaria, as created by the treaty

of San Stefano, the signing of which halted the march of the

Russians toward the seat of Turkish power. He realized at that

early period in the negotiations, that the only solution of the

problem was the liberation of all the Bulgarians and the creation

of a country strong enough and favorably enough situated, with

an outlet to the Mediterranean, to be able to deal with its former

oppressor on something approaching even terms. Had his coun-

sel been followed, Bulgaria today would have been a kingdom

including the entire Bulgarian population of the peninsula, with

a large territory extending practically from the walls of Con-

stantinople to Salonica. That would have been a reasonable

and just solution of a grave phase of the Eastern Question

which would have eliminated a world of trouble that has since

232       Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

ensued in the lands once liberated by the pen of MacGahan and

the sword of Alexander.

But Disraeli would not have it so. His keen financial mind

clung to the reflection that enough Bulgarians must be left en-

slaved to pay the interest on the British loans to Turkey-loans

which Turkey had used partly to keep those same Bulgarians

down. So, with the help of the Iron Chancellor at the congress

of Berlin, the British statesman marred the achievements of your

eminent townsman even before his warm heart had grown cold

beneath the cypresses of Stamboul. The Bulgaria of the treaty

of San Stefano- MacGahan's Bulgaria -was dismembered al-

most before it was born. Macedonia-that land of strife and

suffering-was cut off from the liberated territory and once

more placed under the tender mercies of Turkish rule. Bul-

garia itself, greatly lessened by the elimination of the vilayet of

Adrianople, was erected into a tributary principality, and Eastern

Roumelia, another part of the Bulgaria of San Stefano, was

put back under the Turkish flag as an autonomous province.

Now mark how the far-sightedness of MacGahan was justi-

fied by the events of history, coming fast one upon the other in

the lifetime of his generation.

In 1885 Eastern Roumelia in a bloodless revolution, packed

the Turkish governor off to Constantinople, tore down the Turk-

ish flag over the konak and declared itself an integral and in-

divisable part of Bulgaria, just as MacGahan had intended it

to be at the outset. The coffee-drinking gentlemen at Constan-

tinople scratched their pates beneath their fezzes, spat upon the

ground in disgust, wrote a warm letter to Sofia on the subject

uppermost in their muddled minds, and with true Oriental fa-

talism let things go at that. With the kind consent of Abdul

Hamid the Prince of Bulgaria was recognized as governor gen-

eral of Eastern Roumelia. What difference did it make, reasoned

the coffee-drinking gentlemen, if a vassal (the Prince of Bul-

garia) had made himself governor of an adjoining province?

It's all the same, if it is the will of Allah ! And, furthermore, does

not Bulgaria bind itself to see that the Eastern Roumelian tribute

is paid every year?  It is all the better so, since the tribute will

be paid.

The MacGahan Monument.               233

So matters remained until, in 1908, the Young Turks amazed

the world and took it in completely by the famous revolution

against Abdul Hamid and the proclamation of a constitutional

form of government. Had MacGahan been living, he would have

told his countrymen and the rest of Christendom that the paint-

ing of stripes upon a jackass does not make a zebra; that the

forms and spirit of constitutionalism are as far apart from the

warp and woof of Turkish character as heaven is from the

other place; that the only good Turk is the Turk who has to

be good or feel the impact of the compelling boot.

The events that have come to pass since the enactment of

the Ottoman comedy has demonstrated in striking fashion the

spirit of prophecy that dwelt in the body of Januarius Aloysius

MacGahan. For the atrocities which he disclosed in Bulgaria

in 1876 are being enacted to-day in Albania and in Macedonia,

where the Young Turks are seeking to destroy the nationality

and the religion of discontented subjects, just as they were

doing in Bulgaria under the eyes of the generous son of New

Lexington. To-day women are outraged and children spitted

on bayonets in Albania under the constitutional regime-a re-

enactment of the very methods of pacification which MacGahan

saw and described in the neighboring province in 1876 - and the

same freedom loving England is assuring the world, as it did

in MacGahan's startling revelations, that the Turks are as gen-

tle and humane as they can be in their dealings with subject

peoples.

Had the advice of MacGahan been followed at the close

of the Turkish war, the fangs of the wolf would have been pulled

and the beast would not to-day be tearing the remnant of the

flock.

In the meanwhile Bulgaria is justifying the sympathy of

her great and noble friend from America, who laid down his

life in his service to her. His dream of a free and independent

Bulgaria was realized shortly after the enactment of the Young

Turk Opera Bouffe, when the then Prince of Bulgaria, Ferdi-

nand, amid the solemn setting of the ruins of the Ancient Bul-

garian capital at Tirnovo, tore up the Objectionable article of

the treaty of Berlin -that compact of thieves and perjurers-

234       Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

and declared Bulgaria no longer a vassal of the Grand Turk

but untrammelled mistress of her own house. That house, by the

verdict of history which MacGahan so potently helped to write,

includes Eastern Roumelia. Some day, please God, it shall also

include the still enslaved Macedonia.

The act of Tirnovo roused the rabble at Constantinople to

frenzy. They set up a demand for an immediate invasion of

the territory of the new kingdom. But there were wise men

among the statesmen at Stamboul. Early in the course of the

Russo-Turkish war MacGahan had informed the world, after

the epic of Shipka Pass, that the Bulgarians could fight. Seven

years after that war the Bulgarians had verified MacGahan's

discernment in a series of brilliant victories over the Servians

at Breznik, at Dragoman, at Slivnitsa, at Pirot. In 1908, while

Czar Ferdinand was reading the declaration of independence at

Tirnovo, there was an army of 50,000 Bulgarians -an army

which would have delighted the soul of MacGahan-    massed

on the Turkish frontiers, awaiting the word for a quick march

to Constantinople in the event of a declaration of hostilities

by the Turks. So the shouts of the rabble at Stamboul were

silenced and Turkey perforce acquiesced in the accomplished

facts. Once more the Bulgarians had proved their title to the

precious gift of liberty which was theirs partly by the grace of

the noble work of their friend from far-off Ohio.

One is impressed, as one considers the progress of the

country since those stirring days when MacGahan stretched out

the hand of human fellowship to its unhappy people, back in

1876, what delight it would have given him to revisit Bulgaria

in the present year of the world's enlightenment. Were he there

now he would see thriving cities under a flag of freedom where

in his day terror-stricken peasants huddled in starvation-ravaged

hovels. He would see the gleaming domes of churches where

in his day the shadow of the gallows-tree darkened the land-

scape. He would come upon school-houses and universities

where before he did his invaluable work prisons stifled the

groans of tortured men. He would see the light of noon shining

full into the places which he saw enveloped in the gloom of

night.