As I was writing the present report, a foreigner living in the country told me of a case in which about thirty young Moslems suddenly took up their rifles and made for the nearest Christian village with the intention of burning it down. They had got within a few minutes' walk of their object when the hastily summoned troops arrived and enjoined them, with loaded rifles, to retire, which they did. || My agent reports as follows on the cazas: || 1. Doiran. Though the Bulgarians, relying on the bands in the neighbourhood, especially that of Alexis of Poroia, speak boldly of an insurrection, &c., they keep quiet, and the situation is not serious, and, though the Committees are working hard to prepare the ground, there is none actually established in the caza, and no crimes, &c., have occurred of late. || 2. Stroumnitsa. The situation becomes daily graver, the bands stronger and bolder. They live in the villages, the inhabitants of which dare not denounce them. The Bulgarians are very fanatical, believing that autonomy will shortly be proclaimed, and that, as a consequence, the Turks will be desinherited, and their Chiftliks go to the Christians. || They hold out as an inducement to the Patriarchists to join them that they will be allowed to retain their religion, their language, and their schools; they have only to work with them for autonomy. Committee tax-collectors traverse the country regularly collecting the taxes levied by one of their members in each village every fortnight or month from every person without regard to sex or age no longer one, but two, metalliques (or 1d.) per week. These imposts are bitterly resented even by the Bulgarians, but they dare not object to them. Sure that a revolution will be proclaimed shortly, the peasants are carrying flour and salt pork to the mountains, hiding them there against the coming troubles. || The Moslem population are in a state of great anxiety, not knowing what may happen, and the opinion prevails among the people who may be supposed to know that massacres of Patriarchists will take place before long by the Bulgarians, dressed in Turkish uniforms or Bashi-Bozouk clothes, to force the intervention of Europe. 3. Yenijé. In the Caza of Yenijé, to which Goumenjé belongs, the bands exist only in the north-east, and are those of Apostoli, Arghyri, Yovan, and Trentso, which are mostly composed of local insurgents and commanded also by them, and hide chiefly in the villages of the district called „Vardaria" and at Karasouli. Though not as active as those of Stroumnitsa, on account of their propinquity to Turkish and Greek villages, they work hard in a quiet way in the interests of the Committees. On the 19th instant a lieutenant and eighteen soldiers, who were escorting some twenty suspect villagers of Todortsi, in the plain of Karadjova, Staatsarchiv LXX. 12 to Yenjé, were waylaid by Arghyri's band, which, it is said, effected a rescue without bloodshed, and went off with the prisoners and the weapons of the soldiers, who were unable, owing to the nature of the ground, to offer any resistance. || 4. Gévgeti. Here, as in Stroumnitsa, the toll system is actively pursued. The bands live at the expense of the Patriarchists, because the resources of the Exarchists are exhausted and because they wish to force the former to abet them. The majority of the bands are in the Vlach villages, where the Roumanophils, i. e., Panslavists, backed by the bands, are intriguing actively against the Grécophils or Greco-Vlachs. || The Moslem population appears too terrified to attack the Bulgarians. The 20th instant a villager of Diavato, one and a-half hours' from Gévgéli, whose brothers have long served with the bands, was killed near his village. The Turks are accused of the crime, but the matter is still doubtful. || 5. Vodena. - Two new bands under Lazo, of Sarakinovo, and Gotsé, of Patéli, are working the caza, especially the Patriarchist villages, where they assure the inhabitants that they may remain Patriarchists if they will only help them to free Macedonia. The band recently forced guns on the Greek village of Lokovetz in the plain of Karadjova; but the villagers could not pay for them, and refused to give up a sum of 207. belonging to the church. So they were forced to guarantee a monthly subscription of 1l., as no guns are ever given without payment. In order to make the extortion of money less objectionable, the tax-collectors give the peasants receipts for the moneys paid, to be honoured when Macedonia is autonomous. || The foreigner to whom I referred above told me that on the whole he had never known the Turkish population so quiet and unobtrusive, but that he thinks that if once they let themselves go no consideration will stop them, and the storm will be the greater for the calm which preceded it. || He also mentioned one or two interesting details with regard to the relations between the Bulgarians and the bands. || The bands have lately been exercising a kind of ecclesiastical police and enforcing the Bishop's orders. Some two years ago the Bulgarian Archbishop of Uskub, in order to put a check on the extravagance of the Bulgarian men then getting married, forbade the putting up of the marriageable girls to auction, and fixed a nominal fee of 3. to be levied by the father. This order remained a dead letter till lately, when the bands saw in its enforcement a means of profit to themselves. They have in three cases, reported out of many, made the fathers disgorge the difference between the 31. and the sums they received. In one case it was 97., in another 5l., and in the third 121. || In the latter, the father denied having received 157., and had to be sworn, for which he was charged a fee of 17. || My informant tells me further that where a man is known to have given notice to the police of the action of a band, he is warned and only murdered on his offending twice. In his district, he says, the bands have discarded the use of the knife, as leaving too many traces behind, and taken to using a rope and strangling. A certain baker, a well-to-do inhabitant of Negotin, was condemned to death for repeated spying and entering a house of the village one evening to see a friend - disappeared. || The Christian part of the gendarmerie is being filled with spies, the Turks according to my informant, taking only those Christians whom they had employed before. A Christian who had lately entered the police was sent as Commissaire from Uskub to Kochana, and, after being warned to give up his post, was murdered. Alfred Biliotti. Nr. 13236. TÜRKEI. Der Botschafter in London an den englischen Minister des Ausw. Kämpfe mit bul garischen Banden. Ambassade Impériale de Turquie, Londres, le 14 Mars, 1903. (March 16.) Musurus Pacha présente ses compliments au Marquis de Lansdowne, et a l'honneur de porter à la connaissance de sa Seigneurie que, d'après ce que le Gouverneur-Général de Kossovo a télégraphié à la Sublime Porte en date du 26 du mois dernier, une rencontre a eu lieu entre l'armée Impériale et une bande de 150 brigands Bulgares aux environs de Ladomir et que douze brigands ont été tués et plusieurs autres blessés, tandis que, du côté des troupes Impériales, un soldat a été tué et cinq blessés. Le susdit Gouverneur-Général a aussi annoncé par un second télégramme, portant la même date, qu'une autre rencontre a également eu lieu près d'Osmanié entre un détachement de soldats et une bande Bulgare composée de soixante-cinq brigands; douze de ces derniers ont été tués et, du côté des troupes Impériales, deux soldats ont été tués et deux blessés. Nr. 13237. GROSSBRITANNIEN. — Der Generalkonsul in Saloniki an den Botschafter in Konstantinopel. Erfolge der Amnestie in Macedonien; Notwendigkeit auswärtiger Gendarmerieoffiziere. Salonica, March 11, 1903. (March 23.) Anlage. Sir, || If, as I suppose, the object in view in reprieving and immediately releasing the Bulgarians imprisoned for political offences was to assuage the violence of the Revolutionary Committees and of the bands, the amnesty has been a lamentable failure. Even the Bulgarian Agent at Salonica deprecated the measure when once it was carried out, and stated (I am told) that he had overheard some of the released Bulgarians discussing the question as to which band they should join. || The immediate result of the amnesty is undoubtedly to have increased the boldness of the Komitajis, witness their actually threatening a Consular officer, an unprecedented fact, and a letter from the Monastir agent of a large foreign firm, who reported that a certain Naoum Fontamara was murdered at Okhrida in his shop at 4 P.M. on the 5th instant, i.e., immediately after the release of the Bulgarians, and that the amnestied prisoners were demanding money from merchants and others in Monastir amounting to 20007. || As his name is on the list of subscribers“, he wrote down to his superiors to ask for instructions. This is probably not the last we shall hear of these amnestied Bulgarians. || An opinion, held by some of my colleagues, which I considered erroneous, and which may have been one of the causes of the amnesty, is that the existence of the bands is a direct result of the maladministration of the country, and that the proposed reforms will, in abolishing the one, abolish the other. I am convinced, on the contrary, that the bands will do their best to oppose the reforms, and maintain the present state of disorder which they themselves called into existence, and which constitutes their raison d'être in the eyes of Europe. | The Committees have doubtless a political object, be it autonomy or annexation, and their leaders may be men of the highest motives, but among those affiliated to their bands. there are a great number of mere brigands, whose only object in perpetrating murders, &c., is their own personal gain. But whatever their motives, each party has one and the same object in view, to keep the country in disorder and oppose by all means the introduction of any measure which could calm it. Had their object been the amelioration of the condition of the native Christians, they would have tried to induce them from the beginning to join the movement and not have murdered and otherwise ill-treated them as they have done. And so deep-rooted is the dislike of the non-Bulgarians of the bands that, notwithstanding their detestation of Turkish rule, the latter will not side with them although they suffer much for not doing so. || And be it noticed even now that the Committees are attempting to attract Greeks, Serbs, and Vlachs to themselves by promises of better things, the improvement they say they are working for is not reform, but always the supersession of the Turk. No order can be established so long as the bands exist, - - and the only means, therefore, of establishing it is to carry on their repression at the same time as the application of the reforms. This can only be done by gendarmes commanded by foreign officers. || There is at this moment in my office a Bulgarian who is going from Consulate to Consulate with a Petition to the effect that no band existed in Vrondou (Brodi), and that the burning of eleven houses and nine barns by the troops on the plea of dislodging agitators who were not there was an act of pure malevolence, which caused the village a loss of 2000l. It is not denied, however, that while the troops did not fire on any native, nor any native on the troops, yet the latter lost two killed. The difficulty is ingeniously explained away by one of my colleagues, who says that while the troops were blazing away at empty houses, a couple of Mauser bullets found their billet across the intervening walls in two of their own comrades. || The mere presence of an European officer of gendarmerie will do more than anything else to inspire the populations with confidence in the proposed reforms and in the intention to exterminate the bands and to break the fetters of the terrorism which now binds them. || I cannot, therefore, insist too strongly or too often on the absoJute necessity of immediately dispatching to Macedonia the foreign gendarmerie officers, as they are enrolled, without waiting for the formation of the whole corps. Alfred Biliotti. Nr. 13238. GROSSBRITANNIEN. Der Botschafter in Petersburg an den Minister des Ausw. Unterredung mit Lamsdorff über die Haltung der bulgarischen Regierung. St. Petersburgh, March 18, 1903. (March 23.) My Lord, || I asked Count Lamsdorff to-day what news he had from Constantinople and the Turkish vilayets, and whether he was satisfied that serious steps were being taken to give effect to the recommendations of the Powers. He replied that he was satisfied by the reports which he had received, both from the Russian Embassy in Constantinople and from the Russian Consulates in the vilayets, that as much progress as was possible in the time had been made. || The Porte seemed to be earnestly proceeding with the suggested reforms. || I asked him whether he was equally satisfied that the Bulgarian authorities would be able to stop the passage of the bands across the frontier. He replied that he was inclined to think that the Bulgarians greatly exaggerated the difficulty of the task set them, which was quite within their power; the Macedonian origin of officials which had been put forward as one of the diffi |