ll a question for discussion;
and one would not readily believe that the most gallant and manly of all
the Roman leaders--one of the very few of his race who were capable of
generous actions--was also capable of plotting deliberately to abandon
his followers, when the chances of battle had not been tried. Whether
that memorable flight was planned or not, the imitation of it by
Antonius created a panic in at least a portion of his fleet; and the
victory of the hard-minded Octavius over the "soft triumvir"--he was
"soft" in every sense on that day--was the speedy consequence of the
strangest exhibition of cowardice ever made by a brave man.

In modern wars, panics have been as common as ever they were in the
contests of antiquity. No people has been exempt from them. It has
pleased the English critics on our defeat at Bull Run to speak with much
bitterness of the panic that occurred to the Union army on that field,
and in some instances to employ language that would leave the impression
that never before did it happen to an army to suffer from panic terror.
No reflecting American ought to object to severe foreign criticism on
our recent military history; for through such criticism, perhaps, our
faults may be amended, and so our cause finally be vindicated. The
spectacle of soldiers running from a field of battle is a tempting one
to the enemies of the country to whom such soldiers may belong, and few
critics are able to speak of it in any other than a contemptuous tone.
Would Americans have spoken with more justice of Englishmen than
Englishmen have spoken of Americans, had the English army failed at the
Alma through a panic, as our army failed at Bull Run? Not they! The
bitter comments of our countrymen on the inefficiency of the British
forces in the Crimea, and the general American tendency to attribute
the successes of the Allies in the Russian War to the French, to the
Sardinians, or to the Turks,--to anybody and everybody but to the
English, who really were the principal actors in it,--are in evidence
that we are drinking from a bitter cup the contents of which were brewed
by ourselves. It is wicked and it is foolish to accuse our armies of
cowardice and inefficiency because they have met with some painful
reverses; but the sin and the folly of foreigners in this respect are no
greater than the sin and the folly that have characterized most American
criticism on the recent military history of England.

The most imp