It was not strange that the English should have come to the conclusion that the fogies were unfit to lead armies.  They were in want of an excuse for their apparent failure in the war, and they took the part that was suggested to them,—­therein behaving no worse than ourselves, who have accounted for our many reverses in many foolish and contradictory ways.  But it was strange that their view was accepted by others, whose minds were undisturbed, because unmistified,—­and accepted, too, in face of the self-evident fact that almost every man who figured in the war was old.  Marechal Pelissier,[A] to whom the chief honor of the contest has been conceded, was but six years the junior of Lord Raglan; and if the Englishman’s sixty-six years are to count against age in war, why should not the Frenchman’s sixty years count for it?  Prince Gortschakoff, who defended Sebastopol so heroically, was but four years younger than Lord Raglan; and Prince Paskevitch was more than six years his senior.  Muravieff, Menschikoff, Luders, and other Russian commanders opposed to the Allies, were all old men, all past sixty years when the war began.  Prince Menschikoff was sixty-four when he went on his famous mission to Constantinople, and he did not grow younger in the eighteen months that followed, and at the end of which he fought and lost the Battle of the Alma.  The Russian war was an old man’s war, and the stubbornness with which it was waged had in it much of that ugliness which belongs to age.

  “The young man’s wrath is like light straw on fire. 
  But like red-hot steel is the old man’s ire.”

What rendered the attacks that were made on old generals in 1854-6 the more absurd was the fact, that the English called upon an old man to relieve them from bad government, and were backed by other nations.  Lord Palmerston, upon whom all thoughts and all eyes were directed, was older than any one of those generals to whose years Englishmen attributed their country’s failure.  When, with the all but universal approbation of Great Britain and her friends, he became Prime-Minister, he was in his seventy-first year, and his action showed that his natural force was not abated.  He was called to play the part of the elder Pitt at a greater age than Pitt reached; and he did not disappoint expectation.  It is strange indeed, considering that the Premiership was a more difficult post to fill than that held by any English general, that the English should rely upon the oldest of their active statesmen to retrieve their fortunes, while they were condemning as unfit for service men who were his juniors by several years.