sly or in turn
propounded. They were every one of them admitted to be dubious,
inefficient, and imperfect. I will spare the reader the mysteries of
limitation, of counterpoise, of counterpoise and limitation mixed.
Russia preferred counterpoise, the allies were for limitation. Was this
preference between two degrees of the imperfect, the deficient, and the
ineffective a good ground for prolonging a war that was costing the
allies a hundred million pounds a year, and involved to all the parties
concerned the loss of a thousand lives a day? Yet, for saying No to this
question, Mr. Gladstone was called a traitor, even by men who in 1853
had been willing to content themselves with the Vienna note, and in 1854
had been anxious to make peace on the basis of the Four Points. In face
of pleas so wretched for a prolongation of a war to which he had
assented on other grounds, was he bound to silence? 'Would it not, on
the contrary,' he exclaimed, 'have been the most contemptible effeminacy
of character, if a man in my position, who feels that he has been
instrumental in bringing his country into this struggle, were to
hesitate a single moment when he was firmly convinced in his own mind
that the time had arrived when we might with honour escape from it?'

The prospect of reducing Russia to some abstract level of strength, so
as to uphold an arbitrary standard of the balance of power--this he
regarded as mischief and chimera. Rightly he dreaded the peril of
alliances shifting from day to day, like quicksands and
sea-shoals--Austria moved by a hundred strong and varying currents,
France drawing by unforeseen affinities towards Russia. Every war with
alliances, he once said, should be short, sharp, decisive.[348]

As was to be expected, the colleagues from whom he had parted insisted
that every one of his arguments told just as logically against the war
in all its stages, against the first as legitimately as the last. In
fact, we can never say a plain sure aye or no to questions of peace and
war, after the sword has once left the scabbard. They are all matter of
judgment on the balance of policy between one course and another; and a
very slight thing may incline the balance either way, even though mighty
affairs should hang on the turn of the scale. Meanwhile, as the months
went on, Sebastopol still stood untaken, excitement grew, people forgot
the starting point. They ceased to argue, and sheer blatancy, at all
times a power, in w