Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol 7.djvu/97

A RETROSPECTIVE ENQUIRY. 53 placed under his personal orders; and, since Pitt chap. of course could not have yielded to such a con- ' dition, our country, thus weighed down, and hampered by its own institutions, was left to fight on as best it could without the machinery needed for effectively conducting a war. Nor in causing all the misfortunes which directly resulted from administrative weakness, did our I'olity exhaust its capacity of doing harm. It affected the choice of war measures It affected the choice of commanders. II. But however defective the mechanism of our War administration, was it not somehow made to ' work ' brilliantly in the great war between France and England ? Well, certainly under the sway of their two How the ..... system rival 'kings,' with a military administration 'worked' " during the scattered loose in the way we have seen, and first seven- •^ teen years — at first — without any such a force as Europe of the war. would count amongst ' armies,'(^) a valiant, wild, dare-devil generation of Englishmen carried on a war to the knife against revolutionised France, whether driven by the raging Convention, or handled by the tamer Directory, or led by the mighty Napoleon ; but although — thanks to seas and strong fleets — England always escaped the worst penalties of military rashness, it is not, for that, the less true tiiat during many a year, the stress she put on her foe by all her land-service efibrts bore scarce any proportion