i retois chorei]--THUC. i. 122.

War is the last thing in all the world to go according to
programme.

Statesmen are invincibly slow to learn the lesson put by Thucydides long
centuries ago into the mouth of the Athenian envoys at Sparta, and often
repeated in the same immortal pages, that war defies all calculations,
and if it be protracted comes to be little more than mere matter of
chance, over which the combatants have no control. A thousand times
since has history proved this to be true. Policy is mastered by events;
unforeseen sequels develop novel pretexts, or grow into startling and
hateful necessities; the minister finds that he is fastened to an
inexorable chain.

NEW VIEWS OF THE WAR

Mr. Gladstone now had this fatal law of mundane things brought home to
him. As time went on, he by rapid intuition gained a truer insight into
the leading facts. He realised that Mahometan institutions in the
Ottoman empire were decrepit; that the youthful and vigorous elements in
European Turkey were crushed under antiquated and worn-out forms and
forces unfit for rule. He awoke to the disquieting reflection how the
occupation of the Principalities had been discussed, day after day and
month after month, entirely as a question of the payment of forty
thousand pounds a year to Turkey, or as a violation of her rights as
suzerain, but never in reference to the well-being, happiness, freedom,
or peace of the inhabitants. He still held that the war in its origin
was just, for it had been absolutely necessary, he said, to cut the
meshes of the net in which Russia had entangled Turkey. He persisted in
condemning the whole tone and policy of Russia in 1854. By the end of
1854, in Mr. Gladstone's eyes, this aggressive spirit had been
extinguished, the Czar promising an almost unreserved acceptance of the
very points that he had in the previous August angrily rejected. The
essential objects of the war were the abolition of Russian rights in the
Principalities, and the destruction of Russian claims upon Greek
Christians under Ottoman sway. These objects, Mr. Gladstone insisted,
were attained in January 1855, when Russia agreed to three out of the
Four Points--so the bases of agreement were named--and only demurred
upon the plan for carrying out a portion of the fourth. The special
object was to cancel the preponderance of Russia in the Black Sea. No
fewer than seven different plans were simultaneou