"Such was the natural result of the position occupied by the English in India. The rightfulness of the position may well be questioned. ... At no time, it must be confessed, did they show in more cruel fashion their fixed belief in themselves and in the rightfulness of their cause, and their incapacity for understanding the rights or feelings of those opposed to them. . . . The contest seemed to lie between two savage races capable of no thought but that, regardless of all justice or mercy, their enemies should be exterminated." The right to applaud, and even to exult at times, is justified by the generous integrity of such judgments as this. History of a higher tone has never been written ; at the death of Cavour, Doudan writes : "Ceux qui l'appellent un scélérat ne savent guère de quel bois se sont chauffés la plupart des libérateurs des nations." Dr. Bright knows it well, and it nowhere mitigates the gravity of his avenging sentences. If there is an exception, it is a tendency to be complacent in the Crimea, and to share some of our discredit with the French. He follows Kinglake even on the boulevards, and in his account of the plan of Paskiewitch, which led to the disaster at Silistria, omitting his really historic advice to march upon Constantinople through Vienna. But when Kinglake assigns to the allies at least 24,000 men more than the enemy at the Alma, he scarcely allows an excess of more than 5000. At Inkerman a somewhat unsteady regiment of the French line is aided by the invincible courage of the English. If the fact is so, the tone is not that of the sergeant's speech in giving the health of the French. "Don't you remember when we saw them coming over the hill?"
The Duke of Wellington, who is buried and eulogised in 1852, is the conventional hero with powers mellowed by age, loyal, trustworthy, too good for party ; and the opportunity is lost of strengthening the shadowless Elizabethan portrait with the colours of prose. We have to estimate his fitness as a statesman by his encouragement of Ferdinand VII., his refusal to allow the elevation of the house of Orleans, his fancy for Charles X. and
