66 Notes of the Month on [I AN. 
horrors that must have preceded and followed the Russian retreat, with- 
out the deepest feeling for the unfortunate bemgs who were thus urged 
into ruin. But we cannot regret the punishment of presumption, the guilt 
of an utterly unprovoked war, nor the important discovery of the true 
strength of an empire, which for the last dozen years laboured to impress 
the belief that it was restrained from universal devouring only by the 
difficulty of deciding which state it should devour first. 
The accounts from Bucharest are a terrible compound of the evils of 
war and the elements. Sudden winter—deluges of rain—intolerable 
cold—violent disease—famine—deadly fatigue—and perpetual exposure 
to the enemy, are the scourges that have driven back in shame and ruin, 
the invaders of Turkey. So may perish the unjust wherever their 
standards are unfurled ; so may perish the thirsters after conquest ;— 
such be the only honours of the lovers of war for its own sake. The 
Russians have now twice given the world a lesson. When Napoleon 
attacked them they stood on the righteous side ; and they triumphed by 
the most signal victory over the unrighteous boaster. They have now 
assailed an unoffending power, and their unrighteous war has been 
repelled. Man and the elements have been enlisted to punish them, 
almost in the express form of which their own deliverance offered so 
memorable an example. The Russian bulletins copy involuntarily the 
language of the retreat from Moscow. Long may the lesson be remem- 
bered by nations whose peace is more essential, and whose hostility must 
be more ruinous. The pledge of European quiet would be well pur- 
chased by the deepest severity of the experience that taught the Russian 
sovereigns to seek the glory of their throne only in the civilization of 
their people. 
The Leeds Radicals lately got up a meeting for the purpose of 
“« Liberty all over the World,” and peculiarly for the cause of those pro- 
fessors and patrons of liberty all over the world—the popish priests. 
That liberty should feel any very ardent interest in the concerns of 
men, who, since their first hour of influence, have been the instruments of 
tyranny where they found it created, and its creators where they did not; 
whose law imprisons without evidence, examines without witness, and 
puts to death without publicity ; who acknowledge for their supreme 
sovereign the only practical despot in existence, and who condemn to the 
lowest corner of the bottomless pit every man who dares to think for him- 
self, might seem extraordinary, but for our knowledge of the fact that 
radicalism sees nothing in the affair but the prospect of public distur- 
bance, and that it would have the same sympathy of revolt for the wor- 
shippers of Juggernaut, or for the worshippers of nothing. 
We fully acquit the Leeds Radicals of bigotry on this occasion ; for 
bigotry, bad as it is, implies some feeling of religion, and radicals are 
atheists toa man. The fact is undeniable. The more timid of them 
may set up a pretence of deism. But the more honourable, because the 
more undiseuised, scoff at the assumption of a pretence so shallow, boldly 
elaim credit for their scorn of Divine Law, as much as of human; and 
pronounce as the first article of the Rights of Man in this age of intel- 
leet, “ that there is no God.” 
That those men should unite with the priesthood of popery is not won- 
derful, while they see those priests leading troops of peasantry, with 
green flags in their pious hands. They smell rebellion across the waters 
