1829. Affairs in General. 5 
lose his head, according t6the national manner; an ounce of English 
powder would never have b paid for with copecks and rubles, to be 
burned against Turkish walls ; atrd the coffee-house politicians, and news- 
paper generals, the Colonel de LacyEvanses, and the whole race. of 
wonderers, would have gone on, playing tke old woman, to the ridicule of 
all who knew better, and the cheap benefit.of the autocrat of all the 
Russias. 
But Alexander was cunning, knew mankind, aad had been soundly 
beaten. Nicholas had none of these advantages, the last of which, parti- 
cularly, is evidently essential to the wisdom of heroic sovereigns. Ac- 
cordingly, his first work was war; and the first week of that war was 
enough to settle the question of Russian supremacy. Luckily we may 
now breathe without dread of seeing the face of a Hulan ; and can discover 
at our leisure the charlatanry that had contrived to exalt so much actual 
feebleness into so violent a threatener of European independence. 
There never was, in the memory of man, a campaign that so speedily 
and completely confounded the pretensions of an arrogant government. 
Three months ago showed the Russian army drawn up at the foot of the 
Balkan, and only waiting for the Emperor’s nod to storm the hills, sweep 
over Rumelia, and with scarcely the formality of a siege, walk into Con- 
stantinople. But then came the Turks, ragged and raw; yet not to Le 
driven from their ground by bulletins ; and the Russian battalions rapidly 
felt that the march to Constantinople must be postponed. The labours 
of a whole campaign have issued in the capture of a single fortress, whose 
fall is imputed to treachery, and whose maintenance in the hands of the 
captors is already threatened. On all other points the “Grand Russian 
Army,” the choice of the whole force of the empire, and probably the 
whole disposable force of the empire, has been shamefully beaten. Their 
own bulletins, which of course soften the disaster as much as possible, are 
compelled to acknowledge tremendous losses. We have accounts of the 
staff of armies grouped together in Jassy and Bucharest, without a soldier 
of those armies. Colonels, in all directions, without regiments; brigades 
of artillery, without a gun; hordes of cavalry, without a horse ; cannon 
buried, waggons burned, wounded deserted, hospitals crowded, great 
army-corps left behind, to fight their way back if they can, and pro- 
bably long since broken up, and in the enemy’s hands ; that enemy pour- 
ing on in increasing force, and with the spirit of victory ; and the Rus- 
sians still flying, with the Imperial Guard leading the flight, and the 
Emperor a thousand miles from the field. It is computed that their 
three months’ campaign has cost the Russians not less than sixty thou- 
sand men slain, dead of distemper, cr disabled by wounds and hardship. 
But the scarcely less evident proofs of failure are to be found in the 
rapid changes of the imperial officers. The latest intelligence states, that 
after frowning down some half dozen of the highest rank, and among 
others, the generalissimo, the Emperor despatched an order tothe General 
commanding in Armenia, to take the charge of the Moldavian army, and 
retrieve its fortunes if he can. The case must be all but hopeless, which 
resorts to expedients like this, and runs the risk of disgusting the chief 
officers of his army, for the sake of trying how far the chaser of a rabble 
of the loose cavalry and half uaked infantry of the limits of Asia Minor, 
may be able to stand against the force of European Turkey fighting 
under the eye of the Sultan. 
We regret this melancholy waste of life; no men can think of the 
M.M. New Series—Vor. VII. No, 37. K 
