excuse for their apparent failure in the war, and they took the part
that was suggested to them,--therein behaving no worse than ourselves,
who have accounted for our many reverses in many foolish and
contradictory ways. But it was strange that their view was accepted by
others, whose minds were undisturbed, because unmistified,--and
accepted, too, in face of the self-evident fact that almost every man
who figured in the war was old. Marechal Pelissier,[A] to whom the chief
honor of the contest has been conceded, was but six years the junior of
Lord Raglan; and if the Englishman's sixty-six years are to count
against age in war, why should not the Frenchman's sixty years count for
it? Prince Gortschakoff, who defended Sebastopol so heroically, was but
four years younger than Lord Raglan; and Prince Paskevitch was more than
six years his senior. Muravieff, Menschikoff, Luders, and other Russian
commanders opposed to the Allies, were all old men, all past sixty years
when the war began. Prince Menschikoff was sixty-four when he went on
his famous mission to Constantinople, and he did not grow younger in the
eighteen months that followed, and at the end of which he fought and
lost the Battle of the Alma. The Russian war was an old man's war, and
the stubbornness with which it was waged had in it much of that ugliness
which belongs to age.

"The young man's wrath is like light straw on fire.
But like red-hot steel is the old man's ire."

What rendered the attacks that were made on old generals in 1854-6 the
more absurd was the fact, that the English called upon an old man to
relieve them from bad government, and were backed by other nations. Lord
Palmerston, upon whom all thoughts and all eyes were directed, was older
than any one of those generals to whose years Englishmen attributed
their country's failure. When, with the all but universal approbation of
Great Britain and her friends, he became Prime-Minister, he was in his
seventy-first year, and his action showed that his natural force was not
abated. He was called to play the part of the elder Pitt at a greater
age than Pitt reached; and he did not disappoint expectation. It is
strange indeed, considering that the Premiership was a more difficult
post to fill than that held by any English general, that the English
should rely upon the oldest of their active statesmen to retrieve their
fortunes, while they were condemning as unfit for service men who were
his jun