PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES.

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nature, and purging man from corruption by faith, presents him justified, and a fulfiller of the law, which nature cannot do. Religion more properly respects the service of God; yet takes care of man too. Morality looks most to our conversation with man; yet leaves us not when we come to God and religion. I confess, I understand not why some of our divines have so much cried down morality." -Cent. iii. p. 162.*

And with this citation from an old favourite we shall close our observations on the Chevalier Schler's brochure, which seems to us to be merely put forward as a tentamen, or feeler, preparatory to a more important work, which, from this specimen, in spite of the little defect in reasoning which we have noticed, we shall hope to see very soon in print, interpreted for the English student by the same able coadjutor, who, while presenting it in a garb of pure nervous English, serves up to the reader the undiluted spirit of the original.

ART. VII.—1. Recollections of Russia during Thirty-three Years' Residence. By a GERMAN NOBLEMAN. Revised and Translated, with the Author's Sanction, by LASCELLES WRAXALL. Edinburgh: Constable and Co. 1855. 2. The War in the East from the year 1853 to July, 1855, an Historical-Critical Sketch of the Campaign on the Danube, in Asia, and in the Crimea; with a Glance at the probable Contingencies of the next Campaign. By GENERAL GEORGE KLAPKA, Author of the "Memoirs of the War of Independence in Hungary." London: Chapman and Hall. 1855.

3. The War. By W. H. RUSSELL, Esq., Correspondent of the Times Newspaper. London: Bogue. 1855.

PERHAPS nothing has more forcibly brought out the darker shades of Russian statescraft, than her published doctrines of military and political HONOUR. Eagerly did she wish to maintain that honour at the Vienna Conferences-however her opponents might have been goaded into war by her own hands, her dignity was to be respected-no humiliation must befall her in her capacity of a great European Power. Yet this barbarian claimant to the loftiest civism and the highest military supremacy, is guilty of the grossest prevarication at Vienna, of unheard of savagery at Inkermann, of base

Resolves - Divine, Moral, Political. By Owen Feltham. Folio. London: 1670.

assassination at Hango, attended by the mean gloss of a national lie. She is too cowardly to fight an English fleet, yet displays her paltry pride in destroying her own.

In truth, the Muscovite character remains as it was, when so vividly described by the great traveller Clarke, now fifty years since; nor does it seem probable that any wholesome amelioration can be produced, till she is content to enter the pale of modern European civilization, and disenthrall herself of the serfdom of medieval feudalism.

The annihilation of the grand southern stronghold of Muscovy is a great political feat, because her progression is based upon a succession of defensive posts, each leading to a farther advance. Thus Cronstadt was a stepping-stone to Finland, as the Aland Isles would have soon been to Sweden, Sebastopol to Constantinople, Anapa to Circassia, the Caspian to Western Tartary and the Himalaya, Georgia to Persia, and Persia to India. Her's is the very mathematics of policy. She has first sought for the Tov σr@, and then inserted her lever. It is thus that in the desolation of her mightiest oriental abode, the wild tribes of the Bactrian highlands and the Jaxortes, not less than the servile court of Persia, will see her driven forth stark and naked to the tentless plain, and severed from the comity of civilization by her forfeiture of maritime power. They see, too, her levelled to their own barbaric standard, and simultaneously with the shattered symbol of her sway, is the downfall of her political supremacy in the Oriental world. In the eyes of the East, there is now a power mightier than that of Russia—forthwith the East will worship the rising sun. In this convulsive struggle, our great foe has not scrupled to call in the most distant succours, Bashkirs, Moslem Tartars, Cossacks of the Ural and the Don, the regimented savages of Siberia. And what has England done to meet this gigantic conception of Imperial pride? Absolutely nothing in comparison to her resources. Mistress of the warlike tribes of Western India, the Goorkhas, the martial Sikhs, the Mahrattas, and the population of the whole fringe of the Himalaya from Bhootan to Cashmere, she supinely leaves the struggle to her native sons alone. We scruple not to say that a force of 40,000 hardy troops, able to cope with those of Russia, could soon be embodied within these regions. The observations however, of an experienced military authority,* are so much to the point, that we shall introduce them in this place :

* An old 52nd in the Times of September.

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NEED FOR ORIENTAL TROOPS.

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Acting in concert with our ally the emperor of the French, we ought to arrange that a division of his troops (10,000) chiefly cavalry and artillery, shall meet our contingent in the neighbourhood of Batoum, in May, 1856. Our contingent may consist of three British regiments from the north-west of India, and one from the Cape, and our six regiments of Sikhs, some of which did good service in Burmah. To these might be added a few Indian cavalry, forming altogether a contingent corps of 12,000 men. To replace these troops in India, we have British regiments in the Mauritius and Ceylon, and we have the remains of Runjet Singh's armygallant men, now fretting at the inactivity to which they have been doomed. Ably led, they would finish the campaign of Georgia in six weeks, and the shores of the Caspian from the shores of Astora to Cape Apsberon, would be in our possession in July. The materials for a steam flotilla, framed, and ready to be built, should follow the army. In August, the Russian trade on the Caspian, and the lower Volga and the Ural, ought no longer to exist. The Circassians would then feel that we were indeed the conquerors of their oppressors; and our own line of frontier might be marked out for the future along those spurs of the Caucasus that would present a point d'appui in the shape of a port at their eastern extremity on the Caspian. This point should become to the Caspian what Sebastopol has been to the Black Sea. Such point established, Persia would be under our control, and the Russian aggressions on Khiva, must be abandoned for years, if not for ever. Politically, we should thus deprive Russia of her ascendency throughout Asiatic Tartary; strategically, we should gain a position which she must occupy before she would dare to advance south-east of Orenberg; and, commercially, we should then have the means of diverting from the hands of our enemy, the rich trade of the surrounding districts of Asia, and of carrying it through the territories of our allies to the Black Sea and Western Europe. How long are we to continue a nation of pedlars, without a leader among our executive who can follow in the ideas and arrangements which the great Napoleon (and even on a smaller scale) our own Wellington, have left behind them, as their heirloom for our adoption. Is it that we do not see the way to maintain the conquest I have shown to be within our own power?

. . The Circassians will be our guards of the Marches; the Turks our warders of the Castle. It must be our part, and that of our allies the French, to give them only such support as shall ensure respect to the treaties by which this boundary is to be secured; and should our adversary refuse to come to such treaty, we shall compel him by the control over his resources which his position and the loss of the Crimea will give us."

With this statesman-like and soldierly view of things we heartily coincide. The great south-eastern track through Mesopotamia, Persia, and Beloochistan to India, should be

essentially the route of English traffic. What magnificent results might not accrue, not less in a military than a commercial point of view, from a grand main-trunk railway connecting Constantinople, when invigorated by European life, with Bombay. Such a realization would effect the most peaceful revolution in the annals of our race.

The inevitable result would be to dilute, ad infinitum, the bitter acid of the Moslem fount, that has so long poisoned the wholesome vitality of the East. Constantinople would speedily become more European than Asiatic. She would be what nature has ever intended her to be—the grand central emporium of wealth and civilization of the world. But this is not to be effected, until she is for ever emancipated from the political action of Russia-an object to be solely effected by the successful termination of the war. For this end, it has been truly observed that,

"The only way to bring the war to a close, is to carry it on with all our heart and soul, all the opportunities in our reach, and all the means in our power. We are to listen to no terms, except such as the Allies may have agreed to between themselves, and such as in the exercise of their discretion, they may think best for the security and peace of the world. The only object then, that we need at present recognize, is, to reduce the enemy to the lowest possible condition and compel him to sue for his very existence. Let England know that we have to deal with a foe who knows no rule but necessity, and who will only be restrained from resuming his long cherished scheme of universal dominion by the want of power, and the certainty of defeat. That is the condition to which we entertain no doubt we can reduce Russia, and that is the lesson we trust to impress on her heart."*

Let us add that the lesson will be all the better taught, all the more firmly retained by the Muscovite memory, if their military teachers, from among the Allied Powers, will be content to receive a few ideas from the great achievements of civil science.

We have ever considered that the military operations before Sebastopol have been singularly deficient in freshness of imagination and fertility of invention. The everlasting bombardment, the sap, the mine, the covered way, and the ordinary appliances of a siege on the most gigantic scale ever attempted, all these have been met with stedfast vigour by an obstinate foe. The beaten track of war has been cemented by the blood of hostile thousands, but no independent and original path has been struck out.

*Times, September 11th, 1855.

MILITARY ENGINEERING.

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Nothing would have exhibited in stronger colours the triumphs of the arts of peace over those of war, than the bloodless conquest of this mighty fortress by our civil engineers. Such could undoubtedly have been effected. In lieu of the system of insignificant mines, at a trifling depth below the surface of the earth, a grand and comprehensive plan of subterranean assault, would have at once and for ever have settled the bloody struggle. One single gigantic mine carried under the Malakhoff and the arsenal of south Sebastopol, would long since have consigned to wild destruction the complicated elaborations of Muscovite military genius. The very difficulties of so mighty an enterprise, carried on at a vast depth through a limestone rock, would have at once given the victory to the accomplished civil engineer. The immense amount of material to be excavated, and still more to be disposed of the use of a duplicate railway carried by an inclined plain into the very bowels of Sebastopol-the services of the Cornish mining engines, and the skilled energies of ten thousand English navvies-would have left no chance to Russian military mining. Long before the engineers of Sebastopol could have driven shaft or adit to such a depth, our works would have been completed; our mines, charged with thousands of tons of powder, and a volcanic explosion, would have sent aloft in one tremendous chaos, ships, arsenal, forts, earthworks, garrison, and guns. The engineers, to whom England is so largely indebted for her magnificent railways and still more wondrous tunnels, would have made short work with the Crimean stronghold, and in this glorious challenge of scientific might, would have for ever established the supremacy of the genius of peace over the gigantic inertness of war. The accomplished engineer knows that our mightiest projectiles are but as the toys of science, exemplifying principles, but still unamplified into results as terribly practical as they are overwhelmingly destructive. We weld a gun when we might forge an adamantine volcano; we discharge shells when we might blast with a flying mine. Will Mars never consent to be taught of Minerva.

Well does it behove our rulers to ponder wisely and carry out firmly the terms of peace to be granted to a power so treacherous and so arrogant as Russia. Let them at once boldly pronounce themselves freed from any promises to Russia of territorial integrity; she has been a great plunderer, let her disgorge her prey. Let her make a public national apology for the massacre of Hango; let her be com