114 England and Eurepe, [Frs. 
a rabble, almost entirely new to the field, ill equipped, ill officered, and 
stubbornly adverse to the adoption of the improvements of modern war. 
The personal bravery of the enemy was acknowledged, but superior 
tactics make personal bravery in the enemy rather a snare, than an 
element of success. Victory was secure! , 
Three months of a campaign against half naked barbarians and 
mouldering walls, were enough to extinguish the flame of Russian ambi- 
tion. The veterans of the north fled before the peasantry of Asia ; 
discipline gave way before brave disorder ; and fifty thousand Russian 
corpses, three armies utterly dismantled, enormous financial losses, and 
the lost military name, that Russia had expended her blood for a 
century to purchase, are the monuments of her Turkish war. 
Russia is still a great. empire, with great means of good or evil. But 
the secret of her weak place has been betrayed by herself. To invasion 
she may be inexpugnable. She may present a barrier of adamant in the 
severity of her climate, the barren immensity of her dominions, and the 
rude patriotism of her people; but beyond her borders she is feeble ; 
like her own north wind, her ferce is in her native region: it decays in 
its descent into Europe, and finally softens and sinks away. As a 
menacer or a rival of England, Russia is no more. When shall we hear 
again of Armed Neutralities ; of North-Sea Coalitions ; or of the March 
to India; those showy charlatawries with which the adrditness and arti- 
fice of Catherine and Alexander contrived at once to occupy the eyes of 
European statesmen, and conceal the actual weakness of their empire? 
We have now a chain upon the neck of Russia, which we shall leave in 
the hands of the Turk; and which, at the first growlings from the 
northern den, we shall teach him how to tighten. But peace with all, 
and peace among all; is the golden rule of England. Every shot fired 
in Europe, is a shot virtually fired against her; and as her injury would 
be the injury of every corner of the earth where man is above the beast 
of the field; so is her supremacy the mighty promise and pledge of 
strength, knowledge, and happiness, to the circle of the globe. 
The failure of the Russian campaign may be followed by lessons still 
more important than the chastisement of unprovoked hostilities. It 
ought to furnish a great lesson of the actual weakness of the despotic 
form of government. The leading cabinets may be made awake to the 
living evidence, that the rigidness of authority to which they sacrifice the 
incaleulable benefits of national freedom, is not worth the price ; that 
while it is directly injurious to the mighty nerve to be found in com- 
merce, knowledge, manly enterprize, and that general magnitude and 
force of the human mind, which can grow up only where man is master 
of himself; the external power of the nation is not the more exempt from 
the severest casualties: that this hard and close investiture of a nation, 
this forcing the national frame into perpetual armour, is no preser- 
vative against defeat ; and that the wisest plan may be to hang up this 
memorial of the times of feudality and barbarism among the reliques of 
years in the grave, beat the sword into the ploughshare, and leave man 
to follow the open and generous impulses of genius and nature. 
All the other leading European states, are either in close alliance with 
us, or too keenly busied with their own difficulties, to dare the chance of 
English war. France has learned by the slow wisdom of suffering, the 
infinite importance of peace with a country to which all her coasts are 
open, yet which is totally inaccessible by her: whose fleets can at a 
