When I first went out to Turkey I was very much under the domination of Mr Gladstone's opinion. I was quite full of the unspeakable Turk and his wickednesses and was quite as anxious as the great Liberal statesman himself to see the "sick man" bundled out of Europe bag and baggage. But when I began to move about the country and to meet, as I was forced to do, men of all sorts and conditions among its native population, my sentiments with respect to the Turk underwent a thorough and rapid change. The real people, the men of the commercial and artisan classes and the rank and file of the army, are amongst the best people I have ever known. Their religion enjoins them to sobriety, and as a race they are brave, truthful and kindly, and I never met one authentic instance in which an act of cruelty was chargeable to the men of the regular forces. The hordes of Bashi-Bazouks, of Smyrniotes and Tripolites were of course a set of most unspeakable ruffians, and there are probably no more deplorable specimens of human nature in the world than are to be found among the Paris-bred spawn of the harem.
Almost immediately on my return to London I lunched with Canon Liddon of St Paul's. Our talk naturally turned upon the campaign, and in the course of it I gave him an account of the affair at Guemlik, as being typical of whatever disturbances had taken place between the citizen Turk and the Bulgarians. When General Gourko first broke into the great plain south of the Balkans with his Cossack advance guard, the Christian population rose rejoicingly to receive them and persuaded themselves without difficulty that the rule of their Mahommedan masters was dead and done with then and there. They were supplied with arms and were urged to revolt. There is no doubt whatever that they had a great deal to complain of. They had been under the heel of official oppression for centuries, although in that respect they were not much worse off than their Mahommedan neighbours, but they were a despised and abject race who ate forbidden food and who lived in an almost inconceivable condition of personal uncleanness. To the Turkish peasant dirt is anathema maranatha; in his own station of life he is the cleanest man in the world, and if there is any dirtier person to be found than a Bulgarian peasant, as I knew him in the war year, I can only say that I have not yet discovered him. The Christian population (God save the mark!) were forbidden by law to bear arms, and they were cowards by tradition. Villagers of the two races lived peacefully enough together, though there was an open disdain on the one side always and a smouldering hatred on the other.