 Section 20 of a history of our own times, Volume 2 by Justin McCarthy. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Pamela Nagami. Chapter 26. Where was Lord Palmerston? Part 1. Meantime, where was Lord Palmerston? He, of all men, one would think, must have been pleased with the turn things were taking. He had had, from the beginning, little faith in any issue of the negotiations but war. Probably he did not really wish for any other result. We are well inclined to agree with Mr. King Lake that of all the members of the Cabinet he alone clearly saw his way and was satisfied with the prospect. But according to the supposed nature of his office he had now nothing to do with the war or with foreign affairs except as every member of the Cabinet shares the responsibility of the whole body. He had, apparently, about as much to do with the war as the Postmaster General or the Chancellor for the Duchy of Lancaster might have had. He had accepted the office of Home Secretary. He had declared that he did not choose to be Foreign Secretary any more. He affirmed that he wanted to learn something about home affairs and to get to understand his countrymen and so forth. He was really very busy all this time in his new duties. Howard Palmerston was a remarkably efficient and successful Home Secretary. His unceasing activity loved to show itself in whatever department he might be called upon to occupy. He brought to the somewhat prosaic duties of his new office not only all the viral energy but also all the enterprise which he had formerly shown in managing revolutions and dictating to foreign courts. The ticket of leave system dates from the time of his administration. Our transportation system had broken down, for in fact the colonies would stand it no longer, and it fell to Lord Palmerston to find something to put in its place, and the plan of granting tickets of leave to convicts who had shown that they were capable of regeneration was the outcome of the necessity and of his administration. The measures to obey the smoke nuisance by compelling factories under penalties to consume their own smoke is also the offspring of Palmerston's activity in the home office. The factory acts were extended by him. He went energetically to work in the shutting up of the graveyards in the metropolis, and in a letter to his brother he declared that he should like to put down beer shops and let shopkeepers sell beer like oil and vinegar and treacle to be carried home and drunk with wives and children. This little project is worthy of notice because it illustrates more fairly perhaps than some far greater plan might do at once the strength and the weakness of Palmerston's intelligence. He could not see why everything should not be done in a plain straightforward way, and why the arrangements that were good for the sale of one thing might not be good also for the sale of another. He did not stop to inquire whether, as a matter of fact, there is a commodity at all like oil and vinegar and treacle, whether the same consequences follow the drinking of beer and the consumption of treacle. His critic said that he was apt to manage his foreign affairs on the same rough-and-ready principle. If a system suited England, why should it not suit all other places as well? If treacle may be sold safely without any manner of authoritative regulation, why not beer? The answer to the latter question is plain, because treacle is not beer. So people said with Palmerston's constitutional projects for every place. Why should not that which suits England suit also Spain? Because to begin with, a good many people urged, Spain is not England. There was one department of his duties in which Palmerston was acquiring a new and somewhat odd reputation. That was in his way of answering deputations and letters. The mere routine business of the Home Office, Palmerston writes to his brother, as far as that consists in daily correspondence, is far lighter than that of the Foreign Office, but during a session of Parliament, the whole time of the Secretary of State, up to the time when he must go to the House of Commons, is taken up by deputations of all kinds and interviews with members of Parliament, militia colonels, etc. Lord Palmerston was always civil and cordial. He was full of a peculiar kind of fresh common sense and always ready to apply it to any subject, whatever. He could at any time say some racy thing which set the public wondering and laughing. He gave something like a shock to the Presbytery of Edinburgh when they wrote to him through the moderator to ask whether a national fast ought not to be appointed in consequence of the appearance of cholera. Lord Palmerston gravely admonished the Presbytery that the Maker of the Universe had appointed certain laws of nature for the planet on which we live, and that the wheel or woe of mankind depends on the observance of those laws, one of them connecting health with the absence of those noxious exhalations which proceed from overcrowded human beings or from decomposing substances whether animal or vegetable. He therefore recommended that the purification of towns and cities should be more strenuously carried on and remarked that the causes and sources of contagion, if allowed to remain, will infallibly breed pestilence and be fruitful in death in spite of all the prayers and fastings of a united but inactive nation. When Lord Stanley of Alderly applied to Lord Palmerston for a special permission for a deceased dignitary of a church to be buried under the roof of the sacred building, the Home Secretary declined to accede to the request in a letter that might have come from or might have delighted Sidney Smith. What special connection is there between church dignities and the privilege of being decomposed under the feet of survivors? Do you seriously mean to imply that a soul is more likely to go to heaven because the body which it inhabited lies decomposing under the pavement of a church instead of being placed in a church yard? England is, I believe, the only country in which in these days people accumulate putrifying dead bodies amid the dwellings of the living, and as the burying bodies under thronged churches you might as well put them under libraries, drawing-rooms, and dining-rooms. Lord Palmerston did not see what a very large field of religious and philosophical controversy he opened up by some of his arguments, both as to the fasting and as to the burial in churchyards. He only saw for the moment what appeared to him the healthy, common-sense aspect of the position he had taken up and did not think or care about what other positions he might be surrendering by the very act. He had not a poetic or philosophic mind. In clearing his intelligence from all that he would have called prejudice or superstition, he had cleared out also much of the deeper sympathetic faculty, which enables one man to understand the feelings and get at the springs of conduct in the breasts of other men. No one can doubt that his jaunty way of treating grave and disputed subjects offended many pure and simple minds. Yet it was a mistake to suppose that mere levity dictated his way of dealing with the prejudices of others. He had often given the question his deepest attention and come to a conclusion with as much thought as his temperament would have allowed to any subject. The difference between him and graveer men was that when he had come to a conclusion seriously he loved to express his views humorously. He resembled in this respect some of the greatest and the most earnest men of his time. Count Cavour delighted in Jocos and humorous answers. So did President Lincoln. So at one period of his public career did Prince Bismarck. But there can be no doubt that Palmerston often made enemies by his seeming levity when another man could easily have made friends by saying just the same thing in grave words. The majority of the House of Commons liked him because he amused them and made them laugh and they thought no more of the matter. But the war is now fairly launched and Palmerston is to all appearances what would be vulgarly called out of the swim. Every eye was turned to him. He was like Pitt standing up on one of the back benches to support the administration of Addington. For years he had been identified with the Foreign Office and with that sort of foreign policy which would seem best suited to the atmosphere of war. And now war is on foot and Palmerston is in the Home Office pleasantly chaffing militia kernels and making sensitive theologians angry by the flippancy of his replies. Perhaps there was something flattering to Palmerston's feeling of self-love in the curious wonder with which people turned their eyes upon him during that interval. Everyone seemed to ask how the country was to get on without him and to manage its foreign affairs and when he would be good enough to come down from his quiet seat in the Home Office and assume what seemed his natural duties. A famous tenor singer of our day once had some quarrel with his manager. The singer withdrew from the company, someone else had to be put in his place. On the first night when the new man made his appearance before the public the great singer was seen in a box calmly watching the performance like any other of the audience. The new man turned out a failure. The eyes of the house began to fix themselves upon the one who could sing and who was sitting as unconcernedly in his box as if he never meant to sing any more. The audience at first were incredulous. It was in a great provincial city where the singer had always been a prime favorite. They could not believe that they were in good faith to be expected to put up with bad singing while he was there. At last their patience gave way. They insisted on the one singer leaving his place on the stage and the other coming down from his box and his easy attitude of unconcern and resuming what they regarded as his proper part. They would have their way, they carried their point, and the man who could sing was compelled at last to return to the scene of his old triumphs and sing for them again. The attitude of Lord Palmerston and the manner in which the public were turned upon him during the early days of the war could hardly be illustrated more effectively than by this story. As yet the only wonder was why he did not take somehow the directorship of affairs. The time was to come when the general voice would insist upon his doing so. One day a startling report ran through all circles. It was given out that Palmerston had actually resigned. So far was he from any intention of taking on himself the direction of affairs, even of war or of foreign affairs, that he appeared to have gone out of the ministry altogether. The report was confirmed. Palmerston actually had resigned. It wasn't once asserted that his resignation was caused by difference of opinion between him and his colleagues on the eastern policy of the government. But on the other hand it was as stoutly affirmed that the difference of opinion had only to do with the new reform bill which Lord John Russell was preparing to introduce. Now it is certain that Lord Palmerston did differ in opinion with Lord John Russell on the subject of his reform bill. It is certain that this was the avowed cause and the only cause of Palmerston's resignation. But it is equally certain that the real cause of the resignation was the conviction in Palmerston's mind that his colleagues were not up to the demands of the crisis in regard to the Eastern War. Lord Palmerston's letters to his brother on the subject are amusing. They resemble some of the epistles which used to pass between suspected lovers in old days in which the words are so arranged that the sentences conveyed an obvious meaning good enough for the eye of jealous authority but had a very different tale to tell to the one being for whom the truth was intended. Lord Palmerston gives his brother a long and circumstantial account of the differences about the reform bill and about the impossibility of a home secretary either supporting by speech a bill he did not like or sitting silent during the whole discussion on it in the House of Commons. He shows that he could not possibly do otherwise under such trying circumstances than resign. The whole letter until we come to the very last paragraph is about the reform bill and nothing else. One might suppose that nothing else whatever was entering into the writer's thoughts. But at the end Palmerston just remembers to add that the Times was telling an untruth when it said that there had been no difference in the cabinet about Eastern affairs. For in fact there had been some little lack of agreement on the subject but it would have looked rather silly Palmerston thinks if he were to have gone out of office merely because he could not have his own way about Turkish affairs. Exactly. And in a few days after Palmerston was induced to withdraw his resignation and to remain in the government and then he wrote to his brother again explaining how and all about it. He explains that several members of the cabinet told him they considered the details of the reform bill quite open to discussion and so forth. Their earnest representations and the knowledge that the cabinet had on Thursday taken a decision on Turkish affairs in entire accordance with opinions which I had long unsuccessfully pressed upon them decided me to withdraw my resignation which I did yesterday. Of course Lord Palmerston quietly adds what I say to you about the cabinet decision on Turkish affairs is entirely for yourself and not to be mentioned to anybody but it is very important and will give the allied squadrons the command of the Black Sea. All this was very prudent of course and very pridly arranged. But we doubt whether a single man in England who cared anything about the whole question was imposed upon for one moment. Nobody believed that at such a time Lord Palmerston would have gone out of office because he did not quite like the details of a reform bill or that the cabinet would have obstinately clung to such a scheme just then in spite of his opposition. Indeed the first impression of every one was that Palmerston had gone out only in order to come back again much stronger than before and that he resigned when he could not have his way in Eastern affairs and that he would resume office empowered to have his way in everything. The explanations about the reform bill found as impatient listeners among the public at large as the desperate attempts of the young heroine in she stoopes to conquer to satisfy honest Tony Lumpkin with her hasty and ill concocted devices about shake bag and green and the rest of them whose story she pretends to read for him from the letter which is not intended to reach the suspicious ears of his mother. When Lord Palmerston resumed his place in the Ministry the public at large felt certain that the war spirit was now at last to have its way and that the dallyings of the peace lovers were over. Nor was England left long to guess at the reason why Lord Palmerston had so suddenly resigned his office and so suddenly returned to it. A great disaster had fallen upon Turkey. Her fleet had been destroyed by the Russians at Sinopi in the Black Sea. Sinopi is, or was, a considerable sea port town and naval station belonging to Turkey and standing on a rocky promontory on the southern shore of the Black Sea. On November 30th, 1853, the Turkish squadron was lying there at anchor. The squadron consisted of seven frigates a sloop and a steamer. It had no ship of the line. The Russian fleet, consisting of six ships of the line and some steamers had been cruising about the Black Sea for several days previously, issuing from Sebastopol and making an occasional swoop now and then as if to bear down upon the Turkish squadron. The Turkish commander was quite aware of the danger and pressed for reinforcements but nothing was done either by the Turkish government or by the ambassadors of the allies at Constantinople. On November 30th, however, the Sebastopol fleet did actually bear down upon the Turkish vessels lying at Sinopi. The Turks seeing that an attack was coming at last not only accepted but even anticipated it, for they were the first to fire. The fight was hopeless for them. They fought with all the desperate energy of fearless and unconquerable men, unconquerable at least in the sense that they would not yield. But the odds were too much against them to give them any chance. Either they would not haul down their flag, which is very likely, or if they did strike their colors the Russian admiral did not see the signal. The fight went on until the whole Turkish squadron, say for the steamer, was destroyed. It was asserted on official authority that more than four thousand Turks were killed, that the survivors hardly numbered four hundred, and that of these every man was wounded. Sinopi itself was much shattered and battered by the Russian fleet. The affair was at once the destruction of the Turkish ships and an attack upon Turkish territory. CHAPTER XXVI This was the massacre of Sinopi. When the news came to England there arose one cry of grief and anger and shame. It was regarded as a deliberate act of treachery, consummated amid conditions of the most hideous barbarity. A clamour arose against the Emperor of Russia as if he were a monster outside the pale of civilized law, like some of the furious and treacherous despots of medieval Asiatic history. Mr. King Lake has shown, and indeed the sequence of events must in time have shown everyone, that there was no foundation for these accusations. The attack was not treacherous but openly made, not sudden but clearly announced by previous acts and long expected as we have seen by the Turkish commander himself, and it was not in breach even of the courtesies of war. Russia and Turkey were not only formally but actually at war. The Turks were the first to begin the actual military operations. More than five weeks before the affair at Sinopi they had opened the business by firing from a fortress on a Russian flotilla. A few days after this act they crossed the Danube at Videnen occupied Kalifat and for several days they had fought under Omar Pasha with brilliant success against the Russians at Ulta Nitsa. All England had been enthusiastic about the bravery which the Turks had shown at Ulta Nitsa and the success which had attended their first encounter with the enemy. It was hardly to be expected that the Emperor of Russia would only fight where he was at a disadvantage and refrain from attack where his power was overwhelming. Still there was an impression among English and French statesmen that while negotiations for peace were actually going on between the Western powers and Russia, and while the fleets of England and France were remaining peacefully at anchor in the Bosphorus, whither they had been summoned by this time, the Russian Emperor would abstain from complicating matters by making use of his Sebastopol fleet. Nothing could have been more unwise than to act upon an impression of this kind as if it were a regular agreement. But the English public did not understand at that moment the actual condition of things and may well have supposed that if our government seemed secure and content there must have been some definite arrangement to create so happy a condition of mind. It may look strange to readers now surveying this chapter of past history with cool, unimpassioned mind that anybody could have believed in the existence of any arrangement by virtue of which Turkey could be at war with Russia and not at war with her at the same time, which would have allowed Turkey to strike her enemy when and how she pleased and would have restricted the enemy to such time, place, and method of retort as might suit the convenience of the neutral powers. But at the time, when the true state of affairs was little known in England, the account of the massacre of Sinope was received as if it had been the tale of some unparalleled act of treachery and savagery, and the eagerness of the country for war against Russia became inflamed to actual passion. It was at that moment that Palmerston resigned his office. The Cabinet was still not prepared to go as far as he would have gone. They had believed that the Sebastopol fleet would do nothing as long as the Western powers kept talking about peace. They now believed perhaps that the Emperor of Russia would say he was very sorry for what had been done and promised not to do so any more. Lord Palmerston, supported by the urgent pressure of the Emperor of the French, succeeded, however, in at last overcoming their determination. It was agreed that some decisive announcement should be made to the Emperor of Russia on the part of England and France, and Lord Palmerston resumed his place, master of the situation. This was the decision of which he had spoken in his letter to his brother, the decision which he said he had long unsuccessfully pressed upon his colleagues and which would give the Allied squadrons the command of the Black Sea. It was, in fact, an intimation to Russia that France and England were resolved to prevent any repetition of the Sonope Affair, that their squadrons would enter the Black Sea with orders to request, and if necessary to constrain, every Russian ship met in the Yukseen to return to Sebastopol, and to repel by force any act of aggression afterwards attempted against the Ottoman territory or flag. This was not it should be observed, simply an intimation to the Emperor of Russia that the great powers would impose and enforce the neutrality of the Black Sea. It was an announcement that if the flag of Russia dared to show itself on that sea, which washed Russia's southern shores, the war ships of too far foreign states, taking possession of those waters, would pull it down or compel those who bore it to fly ignominiously into port. This was, in fact, war. Of course Lord Palmerston knew this. Because it meant war he accepted it and returned to his place, well pleased with the way in which things were going. From his point of view he was perfectly right. He had been consistent all through. He believed from the first that the pretensions of Russia would have to be put down by force of arms and could not be put down in any other way. He believed that the danger to England from the aggrandizement of Russia was a capital danger calling for any extent of national sacrifice to avert it. He believed that a war with Russia was inevitable, and he preferred taking it sooner to taking it later. He believed that an alliance with the Emperor of the French was desirable, and a war with Russia would be the best means of making this effective. Lord Palmerston therefore was determined not to remain in the Cabinet unless some strenuous measures were taken, and now, as on a memorable former occasion, he understood better than anyone else the prevailing temper of the English people. When the resolution of the Western Cabinet's was communicated to the Emperor of Russia he withdrew his representatives from London and Paris. On February 21st, 1854, the diplomatic relations between Russia and the two Allied powers were brought to a stop. Six weeks before this the English and French fleets had entered the Black Sea. The interval was filled up with renewed efforts to bring about a peaceful arrangement which were conducted with as much gravity as if anyone believed in the possibility of their success. The Emperor of the French who always loved letter writing and delighted in what Cobdon once happily called the monumental style wrote to the Russian Emperor, appealing to him professedly in the interest of peace, to allow an armistice to be signed, and to let the belligerent forces on both sides retire from the places to which motives of war had led them, and then to negotiate a convention with the Sultan which might be submitted to a conference of the four powers. If Russia would not do this, then Louis Napoleon, undertaking to speak in the name of the Queen of Great Britain, as well as of himself, intimated that France and England would be compelled to leave to the chances of war what might now be decided by reason and justice. The Emperor Nicholas replied that he had claimed nothing but what was confirmed by treaties, that his conditions were perfectly well known, that he was still willing to treat on these conditions, but if Russia were driven to arms, then he quietly observed that he had no doubt that she could hold her own as well in 1854 as she had done in 1812. That year, 1812, it is hardly necessary to say, was the year of the burning of Moscow and the disastrous retreat of the French. We can easily understand what faith and the possibility of a peaceful arrangement the Russian Emperor must have had when he made the illusion, and the French Emperor must have had when he met his eye. Of course, if Louis Napoleon had had the faintest belief in any good result to come of his letter he would never have closed it with the threat which provoked the Russian sovereign into his insufferable rejoinder. The correspondence might remind one of that which is said to have passed between two Irish chieftains. Pay me my tribute, wrote the one, or else. I owe you no tribute, replied the other, and if— England's ultimatum to Russia was dispatched on February 27, 1854. It was conveyed in a letter from Lord Clarendon to Count Nesslerota. It declared that the British government had exhausted all the efforts of negotiation and was compelled to announce that, if Russia should decline to restrict within purely diplomatic limits, the discussion in which she has for some time passed been engaged with the Sublime Port, and does not by return of the messenger who is the bearer of my present letter, announce her intention of causing the Russian troops under Prince Gorchikov to commence their march with a view to recrust the Prute, so that the provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia shall be completely evacuated on April 30 next, the British government must consider the refusal or the silence of the Cabinet of St. Petersburg as equivalent to a declaration of war and will take its measures accordingly. It is not perhaps very profitable work for the historian to criticize the mere terms of a document announcing a course of action which long before its issue had become inevitable. But it is worthwhile remarking, perhaps, that it would have been better and more dignified to confine the letter to the simple demand for the evacuation of the Danubian provinces. To ask Russia to promise that her controversy with the port should be thenceforward restricted within purely diplomatic limits was to make a demand with which no great power would or indeed could undertake to comply. A member of the Peace Society itself might well hesitate to give a promise that a dispute in which he was engaged should be forever confined within purely diplomatic limits. In any case, it was certain that Russia would not now make any concessions tending toward peace. The messenger who was the bearer of the letter was ordered not to wait more than six days for an answer. On the fifth day the messenger was informed by word of mouth from Count Nesoroda that the Emperor did not think it be coming in him to give any reply to the letter. The die was cast. Rather truly the fact was recorded that the die had been cast. A few days after a crowd assembled in front of the royal exchange to watch the performance of a ceremonial that had been little known to the living generation, the sergeanted arms accompanied by some of the officials of the city, read from the steps of the royal exchange Her Majesty's Declaration of War against Russia. The causes of the Declaration of War were set forth in an official statement published in the London Gazette. This document is an interesting and a valuable state paper. It recites with clearness and deliberation the success of steps by which the Allied powers had been led to the necessity of an armed intervention in the controversy between Turkey and Russia. It described in the first place the complaint of the Emperor of Russia against the Sultan with reference to the claims of the Greek and Latin churches, and the arrangement promoted satisfactorily by Her Majesty's Ambassador at Constantinople for rendering justice to the claim, an arrangement to which no exception was taken by the Russian government. Then came the sudden unmasking of the other and quite different claims of Prince Menchikov, the nature of which in the first instance he endeavored as far as possible to conceal from Her Majesty's Ambassador. These claims, thus studiously concealed, affected not merely or at all the privileges of the Greek Church at Jerusalem, but the position of many millions of Turkish subjects in their relations to their sovereign the Sultan. The declaration recalled the various attempts that were made by the Queen's government in conjunction with the governments of France, Austria, and Prussia to meet any just demands of the Russian Emperor without affecting the dignity and independence of the Sultan, and showed that if the object of Russia had been solely to secure their proper privileges and immunities for the Christian populations of the Ottoman Empire, the offers that were made could not have failed to meet that object. Her Majesty's government therefore held it as manifest that what Russia was really seeking was not the happiness of the Christian communities of Turkey, but the right to interfere in the ordinary relations between Turkish subjects and their sovereign. The Sultan refused to consent to this and declared war and self-defense. Yet the government of Her Majesty did not renounce all hope of restoring peace between the contending parties until advice and remonstrance proved holy in vain, and Russia continued to extend her military preparations. Her Majesty fell called upon, by regard for an ally, the integrity and independence of whose empire had been recognized as essential to the peace of Europe, by the sympathies of her people with right against wrong, by desire to avert from her dominion's most injurious consequences and to save Europe from the preponderance of a power which has violated the faith of treaties and defies the opinion of the civilized world to take up arms in conjunction with the Emperor of the French for the defense of the Sultan. Some passages of this declaration have invited criticism from English historians. It opens, for example, with a statement of the fact that the efforts for an arrangement were made by Her Majesty in conjunction with France, Austria, and Prussia. It speaks of this concert of the four powers down almost to the very close, and then it suddenly breaks off and announces that in consequence of all that has happened Her Majesty has felt compelled to take up arms in conjunction with the Emperor of the French. What strange diplomatic mismanagement, it was asked, has led to this singular non- sequitur. Why after having carried on the negotiations through all their various stages with three other great powers, all of them supposed to be equally interested in a settlement of the question, is England at the last moment compelled to take up arms with only one of those powers as an ally? The principal reason for the separation of the two Western powers of Europe from the other great states was found in the condition of Prussia. Prussia was then greatly under the influence of the Russian court. The Prussian sovereign was related to the Emperor of Russia, and his kingdom was almost overshadowed by Russian influence. Prussia had come to occupy a lower position in Europe than she had ever before held during her existence as a kingdom. It seemed almost marvelous how by any process the country of the great Frederick could have sunk to such a condition of insignificance. She had been compelled to stoop to Austria after the events of 1848. The king of Prussia, tampering with the offers of the strong national party, who desired to make him Emperor of Germany, now moving forward and now drawing back, letting I dare not wait upon I would, was suddenly pulled up by Austria. The famous arrangement called afterwards the humiliation of Almuts, and so completely revenge that Sadova, compelled him to drop all his triflings with nationalism and repudiate his former instigators. The king of Prussia was a highly cultured, amiable literary man. He loved letters and art in a sort of dilettante way. He had good impulses and a weak nature. He was a dreamer, a sort of philosopher-monquet. He was unable to make up his mind to any momentous decision until the time for rendering it effective had gone by. A man naturally truthful, he was often led by very weakness into acts that seemed irreconcilable with his previous promises and engagements. He could say witty and sarcastic things, and when political affairs went wrong with him, he could console himself with one or two sharp sayings only heard of by those immediately around him, and then the world might go its way for him. He was like Rob Roy, over good for banning and over bad for blessing. Like our own Charles II, he never said a foolish thing and never did a wise one. He ought to have been an aesthetic essayist or a lecturer on art and moral philosophy to young ladies, and an unkind destiny had made him the king of a state specially embarrassed in a most troubleous time. So unkindly was popular rumour as well as fate to him that he got the credit in foreign countries of being a stupid sensualist when he was really a man of respectable habits and refined nature, and in England at least the nickname of King Clico was long the brand by which the popular and most mistaken impression of his character was signified. CHAPTER XXVI. WHERE WAS LORD PALMERSTON? PART III. THE KING OF PRUSHA WAS THE ELDER BROTHER OF THE PRESENT GERMAN EMPEROR. HAD THE LADDER BEEN THEN ON THE THRONE, HE WOULD PROBABLY HAVE TAKEN SOME TIMELY AN ENERGETIC DECISION WITH REGARD TO THE NATIONAL DUDE OF PRUSHA DURING THE EMPENDING CRISIS. RIGHT OR WRONG, HE WOULD DOUBTLESS HAVE CONTRIVED TO SEE HIS WAY AND MAKE UP HIS MIND AT AN EARLY STAGE OF THE EUROPEAN MOVEMENT. IT IS BY NO MEANTS TO BE ASSUMED THAT HE WOULD HAVE TAKEN THE COURSE MOST SATISFACTORY TO INGLAND AND FRANCE, BUT IT IS LIKELY THAT HIS ACTION MIGHT HAVE PREVENTED THE WAR, EITHER BY RENDERING THE ALLIED POWERS FAR TOO STRONG TO BE RESISTED BY RUSSIA, OR BY ADDING TO RUSSIA AN INFLUENCE WHICH WOULD HAVE RENDERED THE GAME OF WAR TOO FORMITABLE TO SUIT THE CALCULATIONS OF THE EMPEROR OF THE FRENCH. THE ACTUAL KING OF PRUSHA, HOWEVER, WENT SO FAR WITH THE ALLIES AS TO LEAD THEM FOR A WHILE TO BELIEVE THAT HE WAS GOING ALL THE WAY, BUT AT THE LAST MOMENT HE BROKE OFF, DECLARED THAT THE INTEREST OF PRUSHA DID NOT REQUIRE OR ALLOW HIM TO ENGAGE IN A WAR AND LEFT FRANCE AND INGLAND TO WALK THEIR OWN ROAD. Austria could not venture upon such a war without the cooperation of Prussia, and indeed the course which the campaign took seemed likely to give both Austria and Prussia a good excuse for assuming that their interests were not closely engaged in the struggle. Austria would most certainly have gone to war if the Emperor of Russia had kept up the occupation of the Danubian principalities, and for that purpose her territorial situation made her irresistible. But when the seat of war was transferred to the Black Sea, and went after a wild azar withdrew his troops from the principalities, and Austria occupied them by virtue of a convention with the Sultan, her direct interest in the struggle was reduced almost to nothing. Austria and Prussia were in fact solicited by both sides of the dispute, and at one time it was even thought possible that Prussia might give her aid to Russia. This however she refrained from doing. Austria and Prussia made an arrangement between themselves for mutual defence in case the progress of the war should directly imperil the interests of either, and England and France undertook an alliance, the task of chastising the presumption and restraining the ambitious designs of Russia. Mr. Kinglake finds much fault with the policy of the English government, on which he lays all the blame of the severance of interest between the two Western states and the other two great powers. But we confess that we do not see how any course within the reach of England could have secured just then the thorough alliance of Prussia, and without such an alliance it would have been vain to expect that Austria would throw herself unreservedly into the policy of the Western powers. It must be remembered that the controversy between Russia and the West really involved several distinct questions, in some of which Prussia had absolutely no direct interest and Austria very little. Let us set out some of these questions separately. There was the Russian occupation of the principalities. In this Austria frankly acknowledged her capital interest. Its direct bearing was on her more than any other power. It concerned Prussia, as it did England and France, in as much as it was an evidence of an aggressive purpose which might very seriously threaten the general stability of the institutions of Europe, but Prussia had no closer interest in it. Austria was this date, most affected by it, and Austria was this date which could with most effect operate against it and was always willing and resolute if needs were to do so. Then there was the question of Russia's claim to exercise a protectorate over the Christian populations of Turkey. This concerned England and France in one sense, as part of the general pretensions of Russia, and concerned each of them separately in another sense. To France it told of a rivalry with the right she claimed to look after the interests of the Latin Church. To England it spoke of a purpose to obtain a hold over populations nominally subject to the sultan which might in time make Russia virtual master of the approaches to our eastern possessions. Austria too had a direct interest in repelling these pretensions of Russia, for some of the populations they referred to were on her very frontier. But Prussia can hardly be said to have had any direct national interest in that question at all. When there came distinct from all these the question of the Straits of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus. This question of the Straits which has so much to do with the whole European aspect of the war is not to be understood except by those who bear the confirmation of the map of Europe constantly in their minds. The only outlet of Russia on the southern side is the Black Sea. The Black Sea is save for one little outlet at its southwestern extremity a huge landlocked lake. That little outlet is the narrow channel called the Bosphorus. Russia and Turkey between them surround the whole of the Black Sea with their territory. Russia has the north and some of the eastern shore. Turkey has all the southern, the Asia Minor shore and nearly all the western shore. First the Straits of the Bosphorus and Russia would be literally locked into the Black Sea. The Bosphorus is a narrow channel as has been said. It is some 17 miles in length and in some places it is hardly more than half a mile in breadth. But it is very deep all through so that ships of war can float close up to its very shores on either side. This channel in its course passes between the city of Constantinople and its Asiatic suburb of Skutari. The Bosphorus then opens into the Little Sea of Marmora and out of the Sea of Marmora the way westward is through the channel of the Dardanelles. The Dardanelles form the only passage into the Archipelago and thence into the Mediterranean. The channel of the Dardanelles is like the Bosphorus, very narrow and very deep. But it pursues its course for some 40 miles. Anyone who holds a map in his hand will see it once how Turkey and Russia alike are affected by the existence of the Straits on either extremity of the Sea of Marmora. Close up these Straits against vessels of war and the capital of the Sultan is absolutely unassailable from the Sea. Close them up on the other hand and the Russian fleet in the Black Sea is absolutely cut off from the Mediterranean and the Western world. But then it has to be remembered that the same act of closing would secure the Russian ports and shores on the Black Sea from the approach of any of the great navies of the West. The Dardanelles and the Bosphorus being alike such narrow channels and being edged alike by Turkish territory were not regarded as high seas. The Sultans always claimed the right to exclude foreign ships of war from both the Straits. The Treaty of 1841 secured this right to Turkey by the agreement of the five great powers of Europe. The treaty acknowledged that the port had the right to shut the Straits against the armed navies of any foreign power, and the Sultan for his part engaged not to allow any such navy to enter either of the Straits in time of peace. The closing of the Straits had been the subject of a perfect succession of treaties. The Treaty of 1809 between Great Britain and Turkey confirmed by engagement the ancient rule of the Ottoman Empire, forbidding vessels of war at all times to enter the canal of Constantinople. The Treaty of Unkyarskalesi between Russia and Turkey, arising out of Russia's cooperation with the port to put down the rebellious movement of Muhammad Ali, the Egyptian vassal of the latter, contained a secret clause binding the port to close the Dardanelles against all war vessels whatever thus shutting Russia's enemies out of the Black Sea, but leaving Russia free to pass the Bosphorus so far at least as that treaty engagement was concerned. Later when the great powers of Europe combined to put down the attempts of Egypt, the Treaty of July 13, 1841 made in London engaged that in time of peace no foreign ships of war should be admitted into the Straits of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. This treaty was but a renewal of a convention made the year before while France was still sulking away from the European concert and did nothing more than record her return to it. As matters stood then, the Sultan was not only permitted but bound to close the Straits in times of peace and no Navy might enter them without his consent even in times of war. But in times of war he might of course give the permission and invite the presence and cooperation of the armed vessels of a foreign power in the Sea of Marmora. By this treaty the Black Sea Fleet of Russia became literally a Black Sea Fleet and could no more reach the Mediterranean and Western Europe than a boat on the Lake of Lucerne could do. Naturally Russia chafed at this, but at the same time she was not willing to see the restriction withdrawn in favour of an arrangement that would leave the Straits and consequently the Black Sea open to the Naves of France and England. Her supremacy in Eastern Europe would count for little. Her power of coercing Turkey would be sadly diminished if the war flag of England for example were to float side by side with her own in front of Constantinople or in the Lucerne. Therefore it was natural that the ambition of Russia should tend toward the ultimate possession of Constantinople and the Straits for herself. But as this was an ambition the fulfilment of which seemed far off and beset with fast dangers, her object meanwhile was to gain as much influence and ascendancy as possible over the Ottoman government and to make it practically the vassal of Russia and in any case to prevent any other great power from obtaining the influence and ascendancy which she coveted for herself. Now the tendency of this ambition and of all the intermediate claims and disputes with regard to the opening or closing of the Straits was of importance in Europe generally as a part of Russian aggrandizement. But of the great powers they concerned England most, France as a Mediterranean and a naval power, Austria only in a third and remodder degree and Prussia at the time of King Frederick William least of all. It is not surprising therefore that the two Western powers were not able to carry their accord with Prussia to the extent of an alliance and war against Russia and it was hardly possible then for Austria to go on if Prussia insisted on drawing back. Thus it came that at a certain point of the negotiations Prussia fell off absolutely or nearly so, Austria undertook but a conditional cooperation of which as it happened the conditions did not arise and the Queen of England announced that she had taken up arms against Russia in conjunction with the Emperor of the French. To the great majority of the English people this war was popular. It was popular partly because of the natural and inevitable reaction against the doctrines of peace and mere trading prosperity which had been preached somewhat too pertinaciously for some time before. But it was popular too because of its novelty. It was like a return to the youth of the world when England found herself once more preparing for the field. It was like the pouring of new blood into old veins. The public had grown impatient of the common saying of foreign capitals that England had joined the peace society and would never be seen in battle any more. Mr. King Lake is right when he says that the doctrines of the peace society had never taken any hold of the higher classes in this country at all. They had never we may venture to add taken any real hold of the humbler classes of the working men, for example. The well educated, thoughtful middle class who knew how much of worldly happiness depends on a regular income, moderate taxation, and a comfortable home supplied most of the advocates of peace, as it was cornfully said, at any price. Let us say in justice to a very noble and very futile doctrine that there were no persons in England who advocated peace at any price in the ignominious sense which hostile critics pressed upon the words. There was a small, a serious, and a very respectable body of persons who out of the purest motives of conscience held that all war was criminal and offensive to the deity. They were for peace at any price, exactly as they were for truth at any price or conscience at any price. They were opposed to war as they were to falsehood or to impiety. It seemed as natural to them that a man should die unresisting rather than resist and kill, as it does to most persons who profess any sentiment of religion or even of honor that a man should die rather than abjure the faith he believes in or tell a lie. It is assumed, as a matter of course, that any Englishman worthy of the name would have died by any torture tyranny could put on him rather than perform the old ceremony of trampling on the crucifix which certain he then states were said to have sometimes insisted on as the price of a captive's freedom. To the believers in the peace doctrine the act of war was a trampling on the crucifix which brought with it evil consequences unspeakably worse than the mere performance of a profane ceremonial. To declare that they would rather suffer any earthly penalty of defeat or national servitude than take part in a war was only consistent with the great creed of their lives. It ought not to have been held as any reproach to them. Even those who like this writer have no personal sympathy with such a belief and who hold that a war in a just cause is an honor to a nation may still recognize the purity and nobleness of the principle which inspired the votaries of peace and do honor to it. But these men were in any case not many at the time when the Crimean War broke out. They had very little influence on the course of the national policy. They were assailed with a flippant and a somewhat ignoble ridicule. The worst reproach that could be given to men like Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright was to accuse them of being members of the peace society. It does not appear that either man was a member of the actual organization. Mr. Bright's religious creed made him necessarily a votary of peace. Mr. Cobden had attended meetings called with the futile purpose of establishing peace among nations by the operation of good feeling and of common sense. But for a considerable time the temper of the English people was such as to render any talk about peace, not only unprofitable but perilous to the very cause of peace itself. Some of the leading members of the peace society did actually get up a deputation to the Emperor Nicholas to appeal to his better feelings. And of course they were charmed by the manners of the Emperor who made it his business to be in a very gracious humor and spoke them fair and introduced them in the most unceremonious way to his wife. Such a visit counted for nothing in Russia, and at home it only tended to make people angry and impatient and to put the cause of peace in greater jeopardy than ever. Viewed as a practical influence the peace doctrine as completely broke down as a general resolution against the making of money might have done during the time of the mania for speculation and railway shares. But it did not merely break down of itself. It carried some great influences down with it for the time. Influences that were not a part of itself. The eloquence that had coerced the intellect and reasoning power of Peel into a complete surrender to the doctrines of free trade, the eloquence that had aroused the populations of all the cities of England and had conquered the House of Commons, was destined now to call aloud to solitude. Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright addressed their constituents and their countrymen in vain. The fact that they were believed to be opposed on principle to all wars put them out of court in public estimation, as Mr. King Lake justly observes when they went about to argue against this particular war. In the cabinet itself there were men who disliked the idea of a war quite as much as they did. But Aberdeen detested war and thought it so absurd a way of settling national disputes that almost until the first cannon-shot had been fired he could not bring himself to believe, in the possibility of the intelligent English people being drawn into it. Mr. Gladstone had a conscientious and a sensitive objection to war in general as a brutal and an un-Christian occupation, although his feelings would not have carried him so far away as to prevent his recognition of the fact that war might often be a just, unnecessary and a glorious undertaking on the part of a civilized nation. The difficulties of the hour were considerably enhanced by the differences of opinion that prevailed in the cabinet. There were other differences there as well as those that belonged to the mere abstract question of the glory or the guilt of war. It soon became clear that two parties of the cabinet looked on the war and its objects with different eyes and interests. Lord Palmerston wanted simply to put down Russia and uphold Turkey. Others were specially concerned for the Christian populations of Turkey and their better government. Lord Palmerston not merely thought that the interests of England called for some check to the aggressiveness of Russia, he liked the Turk for himself. He had faith in the future of Turkey. He went so far even as to proclaim his belief in the endurance of her military power. Give Turkey single-handed a fair chance, he argued, and she would beat Russia. He did not believe either in the disaffection of the Christian populations or in the stories of their oppression. He regarded all these stories as part of the plans and inventions of Russia. He had no half-beliefs in the matter at all. The Christian populations and their grievances he regarded in plain language as mere humbugs. He looked upon the Turk as a very fine fellow, whom all chivalric minds ought to respect. He believed all that was said upon the one side and nothing upon the other. He had made up his mind to this long ago and no arguments or facts could now shake his convictions. A belief of this kind may have been very unphilosophic. It was undoubtedly, in many respects, the birth of mere prejudice independent of fact or reasoning. But the temper-born of such a belief is exactly that which should have the making of a war entrusted to it. Lord Palmerston saw his way straight before him. The brave Turk had to be supported. The wicked Russian had to be put down. On one side there was Lord Aberdeen, who did not believe anyone seriously meant to be so barbarous as to go to war. And Mr. Gladston, who shrank from war in general, and was not yet quite certain whether England had any right to undertake this war, the two being furthermore concerned far more for the welfare of Turkey's Christian subjects than for the stability of Turkey or the humiliation of Russia. On the other side was Lord Palmerston, gay, resolute, clear as to his own purpose, convinced to the heart's core of everything which just then it was for the advantage of his cause to believe. It was impossible to doubt on which side were to be found the materials for the successful conduct of the enterprise which was now so popular with the country. The most conscientious men might differ about the prudence or the moral propriety of the war, but to those who once accepted its necessity and wished our side to win there could be no possible doubt even for members of the peace society as to the importance of having Lord Palmerston either at the head of affairs or in charge of the war itself. The moment the war actually broke out it became evident to everyone that Palmerston's interval of comparative inaction and obscurity was well nigh over. CHAPTER XXVII England then and France entered the war as allies. Lord Raglan formerly Lord Fitzroy Somerset, an old pupil of the Great Duke in the Peninsular War and who had lost his right arm serving under Wellington at Waterloo was appointed to command the English forces. Marshal Saint-Darnot, a bold, brilliant soldier of fortune, was entrusted by the Emperor of the French with the leadership of the soldiers of France. The Allied forces went out to the east and assembled at Varna on the Black Sea shore from which they were to make their dissent on the Crimea. The war, meantime, had gone badly for the Emperor of Russia in his attempt to crush the Turks. The Turks had found in Omar Pasha a commander of remarkable ability and energy and they had in one or two instances received the unexpected aid and counsel of clever and successful Englishman. A singularly brilliant episode in the opening part of the war was the defense of the earthworks of Silistra on the Bulgarian bank of the Danube by a body of Turkish troops under the direction of two young Englishmen, Captain Butler of the Salon Rifles and Lieutenant Naismith of the East India Company's service. These young soldiers had voluntarily undertaken the danger and responsibility of the defense. Butler was killed, but the Russians were completely foiled and had to raise the siege. At Giorgio and other places the Russians were likewise repulsed and the invasion of the Danubian provinces was already to all intense a failure. Mr. Kinglake and other writers have argued that but for the ambition of the Emperor of the French and the excited temper of the English people the war might well have ended then and there. The Emperor of Russia had found, it is contended, that he could not maintain an invasion of European Turkey. His fleet was confined to its ports in the Black Sea and there was nothing for him but to make peace. But we confess we do not see with what propriety or wisdom the allies having entered on the Enterprise at all could have abandoned it at such a moment and allowed the Tsar to escape thus merely scotched. However brilliant and gratifying the successes obtained against the Russians they were but a series of what might be called outpost actions. They could not be supposed to have tested the resources of Russia or weakened her strength. They had humbled and vexed her just enough to make her doubly resentful and no more. It seems impossible to suppose that such trivial disasters could have affected in the slightest degree the historic march of Russian ambition supposing such a movement to exist. If we allow the purpose with which England entered the war to be just and reasonable then we think the instinct of the English people was sound and true which would have refused to allow Russia to get off with one or two trifling checks and to nurse her wrath and keep her vengeance waiting for a better chance some other time. The allies went on. They sailed from Varma for the Crimea nearly three months after the raising of the Siege of Silistra. There is much discussion as to the original author of the project for the invasion of the Crimea. The Emperor Napoleon has had to describe to him. So as Lord Palmerston, so as the Duke of Newcastle, so according to Mr. King Lake, has the Times Newspaper. It does not much concern us to know in whom the idea originated, but it is of some importance to know that it was essentially a civilians and not a soldier's idea. It took possession almost simultaneously so far as we can observe of the minds of several statesmen and it had a sudden fascination for the public. The Emperor Nicholas had raised and sheltered his black sea fleet at Sebastopol. That fleet had sailed forth from Sebastopol to commit what was called the massacre of Sinopi. Sebastopol was the great arsenal of Russia. It was the point from which Turkey was threatened, from which it was universally believed the embodied ambition of Russia was one day to make its most formidable effort of aggression. Within the fence of its vast sea forts, the fleet of the black sea lay screened. From the moment when the vessels of England and France entered the Yukseen, the Russian fleet had withdrawn behind the curtain of these defenses and was seen upon the open waves no more. If therefore Sebastopol could be taken or destroyed, it would seem as if the whole material fabric put together at such cost and labor for the execution of the schemes of Russia would be shattered at a blow. There seemed a dramatic justice in the idea. It could not fail to commend itself to the popular mind. Mr. Kinglake has given the world an amusing picture of the manner in which the dispatch of the Duke of Newcastle, ordering the invasion of the Crimea, for it really amounted to an order, was read to his colleagues in the Cabinet. It was a dispatch of the utmost importance, for the terms in which it pressed the project on Lord Raglan really rendered it almost impossible for the Commander-in-Chief to use his own discretion. It ought to have been considered sentence by sentence, word by word. It was read, Mr. Kinglake affirms, to a number of Cabinet ministers most of whom had fallen fast asleep. The day was warm, he says. The dispatch was long. The reading was somewhat monotonous. Most of those who tried to listen found the soporific influence irresistible. As Sam Weller would have said, poppies were nothing to it. The statesman fell asleep, and there was no alteration made in the dispatch. All this is very amusing, and it is, we believe, true enough, that at the particular meeting to which Mr. Kinglake refers there was a good deal of nodding of sleepy heads and closing of tired eyelids. But it is not fair to say that these slumbers had anything to do with the subsequent events of the war. The reading of the dispatch was purely a piece of formality, for the project it was to recommend had been discussed very fully before, and the minds of most members of the Cabinet were finally made up. The 28th of June, 1854, was the day of the slumbering Cabinet. But Lord Palmerston had during the whole of the previous fortnight at least been urging on the Cabinet and on individual members of it separately, the Duke of Newcastle and a special, the project of an invasion of the Crimea and an attempt on Sebastopol. With all the energy and strenuousness of his nature he had been urging this by arguments in the Cabinet, by written memoranda for the consideration of each member of the Cabinet separately, and by long earnest letters addressed to particular members of the Cabinet. Many of these documents, of the existence of which Mr. King Lake was doubtless not aware when he set down his vivacious and satirical account of the sleeping Cabinet, have since been published. The plan had also been greatly favored and much urged by the Emperor of the French before the day of the sleep of the statesmen. Indeed, as has been said already, he receives, from many persons, the credit of having originated it. The plan therefore, good or bad, was thoroughly known to the Cabinet and had been argued for and against over and over again, before the Duke of Newcastle read aloud to drowsy ears the dispatch recommending it to the Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in the field. The perusal of the dispatch was mere form. It would indeed have been better if the most wearied statesmen had contrived to pay a full attention to it, but the want of such respect in no wise affected the policy of the country. It is a pity to have to spoil so amusing a story, as Mr. King Lake's, but the commonplace truth has to be told, that the invasion of the Crimea was not due to the crotchet of one minister and the drowsiness of all the rest. The invasion of the Crimea, however, was not a soldier's project. It was not welcomed by the English or the French Commander. It was undertaken by Lord Raglan out of deference to the recommendations of the Government, and by Marshal Saint-Tarnot out of deference to the Emperor of the French, and because Lord Raglan, too, did not see his way to decline the responsibility of it. The Allied forces were therefore conveyed to the southwestern shore of the Crimea, and affected a landing in Calamita Bay, a short distance north of the point at which the river Alma runs into the sea. Sebastopol itself lies about thirty miles to the south, and then more southward still, divided by the bulk of a jutting promontory from Sebastopol is the harbor of Balaklava. The disembarkation began on the morning of September 14, 1854. It was completed on the fifth day, and there were then about twenty-seven thousand English, thirty thousand French, and seven thousand Turks landed on the shores of Catherine the Great's Crimea. The landing was effected without any opposition from the Russians. On September 19 the Allies marched out of their encampments and moved southward in the direction of Sebastopol. They had a skirmish or two with a reconnoitering force of Russian cavalry and Cossacks, but they had no business of genuine war until they reached the nearer bank of the Alma. The Russians in great strength had taken up a splendid position on the heights that fringed the other side of the river. The Allied forces reached the Alma about noon on September 20. They found that they had to cross the river in the face of the Russian batteries armed with heavy guns on the highest point of the hills or bluffs, of scattered artillery, and of dense masses of infantry which covered the hills. The Russians were under the command of Prince Menchikov. It is certain that Prince Menchikov believed his position unassailable, and was convinced that his enemies were delivered into his hands when he saw the Allies approach and attempt to effect the crossing of the river. He had allowed them of deliberate purpose to approach thus far. He might have attacked them on their landing or on their two days march toward the river, but he did not choose to do anything of the kind. He had carefully sought out a strong and what he considered an impregnable position. He had found it, as he believed, on the south bank of the Alma, and there he was simply biding his time. His idea was that he could hold his ground for some days against the Allies with ease, that he would keep them there, play with them, until the great reinforcements he was expecting could come to him, and then he would suddenly take the offensive and crush the enemy. He proposed to make of the Alma and its banks the grave of the invaders. But with characteristic arrogance and lack of care he had neglected some of the very precautions which were essentially necessary to secure any position, however strong. He had not taken the pains to make himself certain that every easy access to his position was closed against the attack of the enemy. The attack was made with desperate courage on the part of the Allies but without any great skill of leadership or tenacity of discipline. It was rather a palmel sort of fight, in which the headlong courage and the indomitable obstinacy of the English and French troops carried all before them at last. A study of the battle is of little profit to the ordinary reader. It was an heroic scramble. There was little coherence of action between the Allied forces, but there was happily an almost total absence of general scholarship on the part of the Russians. The soldiers of the Tsar fought stoutly and stubbornly as they have always done, but they could not stand up against the blended vehemence and obstinacy of the English and French. The river was crossed, the opposite heights were mounted, Prince Menchikov's great redoubt was carried, the Russians were driven from the field, the Allies occupied their ground, the victory was to the Western powers. Indeed it would not be unfair to say that the victory was to the English. The French did not take that share in the heat of the battle, which their strength and their military genius might have led men to expect. Saint-Darnot, their commander-in-chief, was in wretched health, on the point of death. In fact he was in no condition to guide the battle. A brilliant enterprise of General Bosquet was ill-supported and had nearly proved a failure, and Prince Napoleon's division got hopelessly jammed up and confused. Perhaps it would be fairer to say that in the confusion and scramble of the whole affair we were more lucky than the French. If a number of men are rushing headlong and in the dark, toward some distant point, one may run against an unthought of obstacle and fall down and so lose his chance, while his comrade happens to meet with no such stumbling block and goes right on. Perhaps this illustration may not unfairly distribute the parts taken in the battle. It would be superfluous to say that the French fought splendidly where they had any real chance of fighting. But the luck of the day was not with them. On all sides the battle was fought without generalship. On all sides the bravery of the officers and men was worthy of any general. Our men were the luckiest. They saw the heights, they saw the enemy there, they made for them, they got at them, they would not go back, and so he had to give way. That was the history of the day. The big scramble was all over in a few hours. The first field was fought and we had won. The Russians ought to have been pursued. They themselves fully expected a pursuit. They retreated in something like utter confusion, eager to put the Kachka River, which runs south to the Alma, and with a somewhat similar course between them and the imaginary pursuers. Had they been followed to the Kacha, they might have been all made prisoners or destroyed, but there was no pursuit. Lord Raglan was eager to follow up the victory, but the French had his yet hardly any cavalry, and Marshal Saint-Docneau would not agree to any further enterprise that day. Lord Raglan believed that he ought not to persist and nothing was done. The Russians were unable at first to believe in their good fortune. It seemed to them for a long time impossible that any commanders in the world would have failed under conditions so tempting to follow a flying and disordered enemy. Except for the bravery of those who fought, the battle was not much to boast of. The allies together considerably outnumbered the Russians, although from the causes we have mentioned, the Englishmen were left throughout the greater part of the day to encounter an enemy numerically superior, posted on difficult and commanding heights. But it was the first great battle which for nearly forty years our soldiers had fought with a civilized enemy. The military authorities in the country were well disposed to make the most of it. At this distance of time it is almost touching to read some of the heroic contemporaneous descriptions of the great scramble of the Alma. It might almost seem as if, in the imaginings of the enthusiastic historians, Englishmen had never mounted heights and defeated superior numbers before. The sublime triumphs against every adverse condition which had been won by the genius of a Marlboro or a Wellington could not have been celebrated in language of more exalted Dithy-Rambic pomp. The gallant medley on the banks of the Alma and the fruitless interval of inaction that followed it were told of as if men were speaking of some battle of the gods. Very soon, however, a different note came to be sounded. The campaign had been opened under conditions differing from those of most campaigns that went before it. Science had added many new discoveries to the art of war. Literature had added one remarkable contribution of her own to the conditions amid which campaigns were to be carried on. She had added the special correspondent. The old-fashioned historiographer of wars traveled to please sovereigns and minister to the self-conceit of conquerors. The modern special correspondent had a very different purpose. He watched the movements of armies and criticized the policy of generals in the interests of some journal which for its part was concerned only for the information of the public. No favor that courts or monarchs could bestow was worthy a moment's consideration in the mind even of the most selfish proprietor of a newspaper when compared with the reward which the public could give to him and to his paper for quick and accurate news and trustworthy comment. The business of the special correspondent has grown so much since the Crimean War that we are now inclined to look back upon the war correspondence of those days almost as men did upon the old-fashioned historiographer. The war correspondent now scrawls his dispatches as he sits in his saddle under the fire of the enemy. He scrawls them with a pencil noting and describing each incident of the fight so far as he can see it, as coolly as if he were describing a review of volunteers in Hyde Park, and he contrives to send off his narrative by telegraph before the victor in the field has begun to pursue or has settled down to hold the ground he won. And the war correspondent's story is expected to be as brilliant and picturesque in style as it ought to be exact and faithful in its statements. In the days of the Crimea things had not advanced quite so far as that. The war was well on before the submarine telegraph between Varma and the Crimea all out of daily reports. But the feats of the war correspondent then filled men's minds with wonder. When the expedition was leaving England it was accompanied by a special correspondent from each of the great daily papers of London. The time sent out a representative whose name almost immediately became celebrated, Mr. William Howard Russell, the plus chevalier of war correspondence in that day, as Mr. Archibald Forbes of the Daily News is in this. Mr. Russell rendered some service to the English army into his country, however, which no brilliancy of literary style would alone have enabled him to do. It was to his great credit, as a man of judgment and observation, that being a civilian who had never before seen one puff of war smoke he was able to distinguish between the confusion inseparable from all actual levying of war and the confusion that comes of distinctly bad administration. To the unaccustomed eye of an ordinary civilian the whole progress of a campaign, the development of a battle, the arrangements of the commissariat appear at any moment of actual pressure to be nothing but a mass of confusion. He is accustomed in civil life to find everything in its proper place, and every emergency well provided for. When he is suddenly plunged into the midst of a campaign he is apt to think that everything must be going wrong, or else he assumes contentedly that the whole is in the hands of persons who know better than he, and that it would be absurd on his part to attempt to criticize the arrangements of the men whose business it is to understand them. Mr. Russell soon saw that there was confusion, and he had the soundness of judgment to know that the confusion was that of a breaking down system. Therefore while the fervor of delight and the courage and success of our army was still fresh in the minds of the public at home, while every music hall was ringing with the cheap rewards of valor and the shape of popular glorifications of our commanders and our soldiers, the readers of the times began to learn that things were faring badly indeed with the conquering army of the Alma. The ranks were thinned by the ravages of Cholera. The men were pursued by Cholera to the very battlefield, Lord Raglan himself said. No system can charm away all the effects of climate, but it appeared only too soon that the arrangements made to encounter the indirect and inevitable dangers of a campaign were miserably inefficient. The hospitals were in a wretchedly disorganized condition. Stores of medicines and strengthening food were decaying in places where no one wanted them or could well get at them, while men were dying in hundreds among our tents in the Crimea for lack of them. The system of clothing, of transport, of feeding, of nursing, everything had broken down. Ample provisions had been got together and paid for, and when they came to be needed no one knew where to get at them. The special correspondence of the times and other correspondence continued to din these things into the ears of the public at home. Exaltation began to give way to a feeling of dismay. The patriotic anger against the Russians was changed for a mood of deep indignation against our own authorities and our own war administration. It soon became apparent to everyone that the whole campaign had been planned on the assumption that it was to be like the career of the hero whom Byron laments brief, brave, and glorious. Our military authorities are at home. We do not speak of the commanders in the field. Had made up their minds that Sebastopol was to fall like another Jericho at the sound of the war trumpets blast. Our commanders in the field were on the contrary rather disposed to overrate than to underrate the strength of the Russians. It was therefore something like the condition of things described in Macaulay's ballad. Those behind cried forward, those in front called back. It is very likely that if a sudden dash had been made at Sebastopol by land and sea, it might have been taken almost at the very opening of the war. But the delay gave the Russians full warning, and they did not neglect it. On the third day after the Battle of the Alma, the Russians sank seven vessels of their Black Sea Fleet at the entrance of the harbor of Sebastopol. This was done full in the sight of the Allied fleets who at first misunderstanding the movements going on among the enemy thought the Russian squadron was about to come out from their shelter and try conclusions with the Western ships. But the real purpose of the Russians became soon apparent. Under the eyes of the Allies the seven vessels slowly settled down and sank in the water, until at last only the tops of their masts were to be seen, and the entrance of the harbor was barred as by sunken rocks against any approach of an enemy's ship. There was an end to every dream of a sudden capture of Sebastopol. The Allied armies moved again from their positions on the Alma, but they did not direct their march to the north side of Sebastopol. They made for Balaklava, which lies south of the city on the other side of a promontory, and which has a port that might enable them to secure a constant means of communication between the armies and the fleets. To reach Balaklava the Allied forces had to undertake a long and fatiguing flank march passing Sebastopol on their right. They accomplished the march in safety and occupied the heights above Balaklava, while the fleets appeared at the same time in the harbor. Sebastopol was but a few miles off, and preparations were at once made for an attack on it by land and sea. On October 17th the attack began. It was practically a failure. Nothing better indeed could well have been expected. The fleet could not get near enough to the sea-forts of Sebastopol to make their broadsides of any real effect, because of the shallow water and the sunken ships, and although the attack from the land was vigorous and was fiercely kept up, yet it could not carry its object. It became clear that Sebastopol was not to be taken by any coup d'etat, and the Allies had not meant enough to invest it. They were therefore to some extent themselves in the condition of a besieged force, for the Russians had a large army outside Sebastopol, ready to make every sacrifice for the purpose of preventing the English and French from getting even a chance of undisturbed operations against it. The Russians attacked the Allies fiercely on October 25th, in the hope of obtaining possession of Balaklava. The attempt was bold and brilliant, but it was splendidly repulsed. Never did a day of battle do more credit to English courage, or less perhaps to English generalship. The cavalry particularly distinguished themselves. It was in great measure on our side a cavalry action. It will be memorable in all English history, as the battle in which occurred the famous charge of the Light Brigade, owing to some fatal misconception of the meaning of an order from the Commander-in-Chief, the Light Brigade, 607 men in all, charged what has been rightly described as the Russian army in position. The brigade was composed of 118 men of the Fourth Light Dragoons, 104 of the Eighth Hussars, 110 of the Eleventh Hussars, 130 of the Thirteenth Light Dragoons, and 145 of the Seventeenth Lancers. Of the 607 men, 198 came back. Long, painful, and hopeless were the disputes about this fatal order. The controversy can never be wholly settled. The officer who bore the order was one of the first who fell in the outset. All Europe, all the world, rang with wonder and admiration of the feudal and splendid charge. The poet laureate sang of it in spirited verses. Perhaps its best epitaph was contained in the celebrated comment ascribed to the French general Busquet, and which has since become proverbial and has been quoted until men are well nigh tired of it. It was magnificent, but it was not war. Next day the enemy made another vigorous attack on a much larger scale, moving out of Sebastopol itself and were again repulsed. The allies were able to prevent the troops who made the sortee from cooperating with the Russian army outside who had attacked at Balaklava. The latter were endeavouring to entrench themselves at the little village of Inkerman, lying on the north of Sebastopol. But the stout resistance they met with from the allies frustrated their plans. On November 5, the Russians made another grand attack on the allies, chiefly on the British, and were once more splendidly repulsed. The plateau of Inkerman was the principal scene of the struggle. It was occupied by the guards and a few British regiments, on whom fell, until General Busquet with his French were able to come to their assistance, the task of resisting a Russian army. This was the severest and the fiercest engagement of the campaign. The loss to the English was 2,612, of whom 145 were officers. The French lost about 1,700. The Russians were believed to have lost 12,000 men, but at no time could any clear account be obtained of the Russian losses. It was believed that they brought a force of 50,000 men to the attack. Inkerman was described at the time as the soldier's battle. Strategy it was said everywhere, there was none. The attack was made undercover of a dark and drizzling mist. The battle was fought for a while almost absolutely in the dark. There was hardly any attempt to direct the Allies by any principles of scientific warfare. The soldiers fought stubbornly a series of hand-to-hand fights, and we are entitled to say that the better men won in the end. We fully admit that it was a soldier's battle. All the comment we have to make upon the epithet is, that we do not exactly know which of the engagements fought in the Crimea was anything but a soldier's battle. Of course with the soldiers we take the officers. A battle in the Crimea with which general ship had anything particular to do has certainly not come under the notice of this writer. Mr. King Lake tells us that at Alma, Marshal Saint-Docneau, the French Commander-in-Chief, addressing General Conrobert and Prince Napoleon said, With such men as you I have no orders to give. I have but to point to the enemy. This seems to have been the general principle on which the commanders conducted the campaign. There were the enemy's forces. Let the men go at them any way they could. Nor under the circumstances could anything much better have been done. When orders were given it appeared more than once as if things would have gone better without them. The soldier won his battle always. No general could prevent him from doing that. Meanwhile, what were people saying in England? They were indignantly declaring that the whole campaign was a muddle. It was evident now that Sebastopol was not going to fall all at once. It was evident, too, that the preparations had been made on the assumption that it must fall at once. To make the disappointment more bitter at home, the public had been deceived for a few days by a false report of the taking of Sebastopol, and the disappointment naturally increased the impatience and dissatisfaction of Englishmen. The fleet that had been sent out to the Baltic came back without having accomplished anything in particular. And although there really was nothing in particular that it could have accomplished under the circumstances, yet many people were as angry as if it had culpably allowed the enemy to escape it on the open seas. The sailing of the Baltic fleet had indeed been preceded by ceremonials especially calculated to make any enterprise ridiculous, which failed to achieve some startling success. It was put under the command of Sir Charles Napier, a brave old salt of the fast-fading school of Smollett's Commander Trunnion, rough, dashing, bullheaded, likely enough to succeed where sheer force and courage could win victories, but wanting in all the intellectual qualities of a commander and endowed with a violent tongue and an almost unmatched indiscretion. Sir Charles Napier was a member of a family famed for its warriors, but he had not anything like the capacity of his cousin, the other Sir Charles Napier, the Conqueror of Sindit, or the intellect of Sir William Napier, the historian of the Peninsular War. He had won some signal and surprising successes in the Portuguese Civil War and in Syria, all under conditions wholly different and with an enemy wholly different from those he would have to encounter in the Baltic. But the voice of admiring friends was tumultuously raised to predict splendid things for him before his fleet had left its port, and he himself quite forgot in his rough self-confidence the difference between boasting when one is taking off his armor and boasting when one is only putting it on. His friends entertained him at a farewell dinner at the Reform Club. Lord Palmerston was present, and Sir James Graham, the First Lord of the Admiralty, and a great deal of exuberant nonsense was talked. Lord Palmerston, carried away by his natural bonhomie and his high animal spirits, showered the most extravagant praises upon the gallant admiral, intermixed with jokes which set the company laughing consumedly, but which, read by the outer public next day, seemed unbecoming preludes to an expedition that was to be part of a great war and of terrible national sacrifices. The one only thing that could have excused the whole performance would have been some overwhelming success on the part of him who was its hero. But it is not probable that a Dundonald or even a Nelson could have done much in the Baltic just then, and Napier was not a Dundonald or a Nelson. The Baltic fleet came home safely after a while, its commander having brought with him nothing but a grievance which lasted him all the remainder of his life. The public were amazed, scornful, wrathful, and they began to think that they were destined to see nothing but failure as the fruit of the campaign. In truth they were extravagantly impatient. Perhaps they were not to be blamed. Their leaders who ought to have known better had been filling them with the idea that they had nothing to do but to sweep the enemy from sea and land. The temper of a people thus stimulated and thus disappointed is almost always indiscriminating and unreasonable in its censure. The first idea is to find a victim. The victim on whom the anger of a large portion of the public turned in this instance was the Prince Consort. The most absurd ideas, the most cruel and baseless columnese were in circulation about him. He was accused of having out of some inscrutable motive made use of all his secret influence to prevent the success of the campaign. He was charged with being in conspiracy with Prussia, with Russia, and with no one knew exactly whom to weaken the strength of England and secure a triumph for her enemies. Prince were actually told at one time of his having been arrested for high treason. He had and one of his speeches about this time said that constitutional government was under a heavy trial and could only pass triumphantly through it if the country would grant its confidence to Her Majesty's government. In this observation, as the whole context of the speech showed, the Prince was only explaining that the Queen's government were placed at a disadvantage in the carrying on of a war as compared with a government like that of the Emperor of the French, who could act on his own arbitrary will, without check, delay or control on the part of any parliamentary body. But the speech was instantly fastened on as illustrating the princes' settled and unconquerable dislike of all constitutional and popular principles of government. Those who opposed the Prince had not indeed been waiting for his speech at the Trinity House dinner to denounce and condemn him, but the sentence in that speech to which reference has been made opened upon him a new torrent of hostile criticism. The charges which sprang of this heated and unjust temper on the part of the public did not indeed long prevail against the Prince consort. When once the subject came to be taken up in Parliament, it was shown almost in a moment that there was not the slightest ground or excuse for any of the absurd surmises and cruel suspicions which had been creating so much agitation. The agitation collapsed in a moment, but while it lasted, it was both vehement and intense and gave much pain to the Prince and far more pain still to the Queen his wife. We have seen more lately and on a larger scale something like the phenomenon of that time. During the war between France and Germany the people of Paris went nearly wild with the idea that they had been betrayed and were clamorous for victims to punish anywhere or anyhow. To many calm Englishmen this seemed monstrously unreasonable and unworthy and the French people received from English writers many grave rebukes and wise exhortations. But the temper of the English public at one period of the Crimean War was becoming very like that which set Paris wild during the disastrous struggle with Germany. The passions of peoples are it is said to be feared very much alike in their impulses and even in their manifestations. And if England, during the Crimean War, never came to the wild condition into which Paris fell during the later struggle, it is perhaps rather because on the whole things went well with England than in consequence of any very great superiority of Englishmen in judgment and self-restraint over the excitable people of France. Certainly those who remember what we may call the dark days of the Crimean Campaign, when disappointment following on extravagant confidence had incited popular passion to call for some victim, will find themselves slow to set a limit to the lengths that passion might have reached if the Russians had actually been successful even in one or two battles. The winter was gloomy at home as well as abroad. The news constantly arriving from the Crimea told only of devastation caused by foes far more formidable than the Russians. Sickness. Bad weather. Bad management. The black sea was swept and scourged by terrible storms. The destruction of transport ships laden with winter stores for our men was of incalculable injury to the army. Blanketing, blanketing, provisions, hospital necessities of all kinds were destroyed in vast quantities. The loss of life among the crews of the vessels was immense. A storm was nearly as disastrous in this way as a battle. Unsure the sufferings of the army were unspeakable. The tents were torn from their pegs and blown away. The officers and men were exposed to the bitter cold and the fierce stormy blasts. Our soldiers had for the most part little experience or even idea of such cold as they had to encounter this gloomy winter. The intensity of the cold was so great that no one might dare to touch any metal substance in the open air with his bare hand under penalty of leaving the skin behind him. The hospitals for the sick and wounded at Skutari were in a wretchedly disorganized condition. They were for the most part in an absolutely chaotic condition as regards arrangement and supply. In some instances medical stores were left to decay at Varna, where were found lying useless in the holds of vessels in Balaklava Bay, which were needed for the wounded at Skutari. The medical officers were able and zealous men. The stores were provided and paid for so far as our government was concerned. But the stores were not brought to the medical men. These had their hands all but idle, their eyes and souls tortured by the sight of sufferings which they were unable to relieve for want of the commonest appliances of the hospital. The most extraordinary instances of blunder and confusion were constantly coming to light. Great consignments of boots arrived and were found to be all for the left foot. Mules for the conveyance of stores were contracted for and delivered, but delivered so that they came into the hands of the Russians and not of us. Shameful frauds were perpetrated in the instance of some of the contracts for preserved meat. One man's preserved meat, exclaimed Punch, with bitter humor, is another man's poison. The evils of the hospital disorganization were happily made a means of bringing about a new system of attending to the sick and wounded in war which has already created something like a revolution in the manner of treating the victims of battle. Mr. Sidney Herbert, horrified at the way in which things were managed in Scutari and the Crimea, applied to a distinguished woman who had long taken a deep interest in hospital reform to superintend personally the nursing of the soldiers. Ms. Florence Nightingale was the daughter of a wealthy English country gentleman. She had chosen not to pass her life in fashionable or aesthetic inactivity and had from a very early period turned her attention to sanitary questions. She had studied nursing as a science and a system and had made herself acquainted with the working of various continental institutions and about the time when the war broke out she was actually engaged in reorganizing the sick governess's institution in Harley Street, London. To her Mr. Sidney Herbert turned. He offered her, if she would accept the task he proposed, plenary authority over all the nurses and an unlimited power of drawing on the government for whatever she might think necessary to the success of her undertaking. Ms. Nightingale accepted the task and went out to Scutari, accompanied by some women of rank like her own and a trained staff of nurses. They speedily reduced chaos into order and from the time of their landing in Scutari there was at least one department of the business of war which was never again a subject of complaint. The spirit of the chivalric days had been restored under better auspices for its abiding influence. These of rank once more devoted themselves to the service of the wounded and the endless come of the Mrs. Gamp and Mrs. Prig type of nurse. Sidney Herbert in his letter to Ms. Nightingale had said that her example, if she accepted the task he proposed, would multiply the good to all time. These words proved to have no exaggeration in them. We have never seen a war since in which women of education and of genuine devotion have not given themselves up to the task of caring for the wounded. The Geneva Convention and the Bering of the Red Cross are among the results of Florence Nightingale's work in the Crimea. But the siege of Sebastopol was meanwhile dragging heavily along, and sometimes it was not quite certain which ought to be called the besieged, the Russians in the city, or the Allies encamped inside of it. During some months the Allied armies did little or nothing, the commissariat system and the land transport system had broken down. The armies were miserably weakened by sickness. Cholera was ever an anon raging anew among our men. Horses and mules were dying of cold and starvation. The roads were only deep irregular ruts filled with mud. The camp was a marsh. The tents stood often in pools of water. The men had sometimes no beds but straw dripping with wet, and hardly any bed coverings. Our unfortunate Turkish Allies were in a far more wretched plight than even we ourselves. The authorities who ought to have looked after them were impervious to the criticisms of special correspondence and unassailable bipartisan parliamentary votes of censure. A condemnation of the latter kind was hanging over our government. Lord John Russell became impressed with the conviction that the Duke of Newcastle was not strong enough for the post of War Minister, and he wrote to Lord Aberdeen urging that the War Department should be given to Lord Palmerston. Lord Aberdeen replied that although another person might have been a better choice when the appointments were made in the first instance, yet in the absence of any proved defect or alleged in capacity, there was no sufficient ground for making a kind of speculative change. Parliament was called together before Christmas, and after the Christmas recess Mr. Roebuck gave notice that he would move for a select committee to inquire into the condition of the army before Sebastopol, and into the conduct of those departments of the government whose duty it had been to minister to the wants of the army. Lord John Russell did not believe for himself that the motion could be conscientiously resisted, but as it necessarily involved a censure upon some of his colleagues he did not think he ought to remain longer in the ministry and he therefore resigned his office. The sudden resignation of the leader of the House of Commons was a death blow to any plans of resistance by which the government might otherwise have thought of encountering Mr. Roebuck's motion. Lord Palmerston, although Lord John Russell's course was a marked tribute to his own capacity, had remonstrated warmly with Russell by letter as to his determination to resign. You will have the appearance, he said, of having remained in office aiding and carrying on a system of which you disapprove until driven out by Roebuck's announced notice, and the government will have the appearance of self-condemnation by flying from a discussion which they dare not face. While as regards the country, the action of the Executive will be paralyzed for a time in a critical moment of a great war with an impending negotiation, and we shall exhibit to the world a melancholy spectacle of disorganization among our political men at home similar to that which has prevailed among our military men abroad. The remonstrance, however, came too late, even if it could have had any effect at any time. Mr. Roebuck's motion came on and was resisted with vigor by Lord Palmerston and Mr. Gladston. When Palmerston insisted that the responsibility ought to fall not on the Duke of Newcastle but on the whole Cabinet, and with a generosity which his keenest opponents might have admitted to be characteristic of him, he accepted the task of defending an administration whose chief blame was in the eyes of most people, that they had not given the control of the war into his hands. Mr. Gladston declared that the inquiry sought for by the resolution could lead to nothing but confusion and disturbance, mist, disasters, shame at home, and weakness abroad. It would convey no consolation to those whom you seek to aid, but it would carry malignant joy to the hearts of the enemies of England. The House of Commons was not to be moved by any such argument or appeal. The one pervading idea was that England had been endangered and shamed by the breakdown of her army organization. When the division took place, three hundred and five members voted for Mr. Roebuck's motion and only one hundred and forty-eight against. The majority against ministers was therefore one hundred and fifty-seven. Everyone knows what a scene usually takes place when a ministry is defeated in the House of Commons. Cheering again and again renewed, counter-chairs of defiance, wild exaltation, vehement indignation, a whole whirlpool of various emotions seething in that little hall in St. Stephen's. But this time there was no such outburst. The House could hardly realize the fact that the ministry of all the talents had been thus completely and ignominiously defeated. A dead silence followed the announcement of the numbers. Then there was a half-breathless murmur of amazement and incredulity. The speaker repeated the numbers, and doubt was over. It was still uncertain how the House would express its feelings. Suddenly someone laughed. The sound gave a direction and a relief to perplexed pent-up emotion. Shouts of laughter followed. Not merely the pledged opponents of the government laughed. Many of those who had voted with ministers found themselves laughing, too. It seemed so absurd, so incongruous, this way of disposing of the great coalition government. Many must have thought of the night of fierce debate little more than two years before, when Mr. Disraeli, then on the verge of his fall from power, and realizing fully the strength of the combination against him, consoled his party in himself, for the imminent fatality awaiting them by the defiant words. I know that I have to face a coalition. The combination may be successful, the combination has before this been successful, but coalitions, though they may be successful, have always found that their triumphs have been brief. Yes I know that England does not love coalitions. Only two years had passed and the great coalition had fallen, overwhelmed with reproach and popular indignation, and amid sudden shouts of laughter.