n
Court and childishly false and cunning king deserved. He has been
assailed by every form of temptation, through his hopes and through his
fears, and has remained faithful and disinterested. Such conduct deserves
the admiration with which England has repaid it.

'We cannot praise him as an administrator. He is indolent and
procrastinating. He hates details, and therefore does not understand
them. When he has given an order he does not see to its execution;
indeed, he cannot, for he does not know how it ought to be executed. He
directed a fleet to be prepared to co-operate with us in the Baltic in
the spring. Ducos, his Minister of Marine, assured him that it was ready.
The time came, and not a ship was rigged or manned. He asked us to
suspend the expedition for a couple of months. We refused, and sailed
without the French squadron. If the Russians had ventured out, and we
either had beaten them single-handed, or been repulsed for want of the
promised assistance, the effect on France would have been frightful. We
have reason to believe that it was only in the middle of February that he
made up his mind to send an army to Bulgaria. They arrived by driblets,
without any plan of operations, and it was not until August that their
battering train left Toulon. It ought to have reached Sebastopol in May.
In time, however, he must see the necessity of either becoming an active
man of business himself, or of ministering, like other sovereigns,
through his Ministers. Up to the present time many causes have concurred
to occasion him to endeavour to be his own Minister, and to treat those
to whom he gives that name as mere clerks. He is jealous and suspicious,
fond of power, and impatient of contradiction. With the exception of
Drouyn de l'Huys, the eminent men of France, her statesmen and her
generals, stand aloof from him. Those who are not in exile have retired
from public life, and offer neither assistance nor advice. Advice,
indeed, he refuses, and, what is still more useful than advice, censure,
he punishes.

'But the war, though it must last longer, and cost, more in men and in
money than it would have done if it were managed with more intelligence
and activity, must end favourably. Ill managed as it has been by
France, it has been worse managed by Russia. It is impossible that that
semi-barbarous empire, with its scarcely sane autocrat, its corrupt
administration, its disordered finances, and its heterogeneous
populations