of Russia, while he might well suppose that the
French had had enough of Russian warfare to satisfy them for the rest of
the century. Had his astute policy been adopted and acted on, there
never would have been a Crimean War, and Sebastopol would not now be a
ruin; and Russia would have been greater than she is likely to be in our
time, or in the time of our children.

Bluecher, who completed the work which Kutusoff began, and in a manner
which the Russian would hardly have approved, was an older man than the
hero of Borodino. When called to the command of the Prussian army, in
March, 1813, he was in his seventy-first year; and he was in his
seventy-third year when his energy enabled him, in the face of
difficulties that no other commander could have overcome, to bring up
more than fifty thousand men to the assistance of Wellington at
Waterloo, losing more than an eighth of their number. He had no military
talent, as the term is generally used. He could not tell whether a plan
was good or bad. He could not understand the maps. He was not a
disciplinarian, and he was ignorant of all the details of preparing an
army, of clothing and feeding and arming it. In all those things which
it is supposed a commander should know, and which such commanders as
Napoleon and Wellington did know well, he was so entirely ignorant, that
he might have been raised to the head of an army of United States
Volunteers amid universal applause. He was vicious to an extent that
surprised even the fastest men of that vicious time,--a gambler, a
drunkard, and a loose liver every way, indulging in vices that are held
by mild moralists to be excusable in youth who are employed in sowing
wild oats, but which are universally admitted to be disgusting in those
upon whom age has laid its withering hand. Yet this vicious and ignorant
old man had more to do with bringing about the fall of Napoleon than all
the generals and statesmen of the Allies combined. He had energy, which
is the most valuable of all qualities in a military leader; and he
hated Napoleon as heartily as he hated Satan, and a great deal more
heartily than he hated sin. Mr. Dickens tells us that the vigorous
tenacity of love is always much stronger than hate, and perhaps he is
right, so far as concerns private life; but in public life hate is by
far the stronger passion. But for Bluecher's hatred of Napoleon the
campaign of 1813 would have terminated in favor of the Emperor, that of
1814 n