After an interval of time filled up by military movements below 
criticism, because they were made, not upon strategical and 
tactical, but upon diplomatic and parliamentary grounds, the 
investment and attack of Silistria affords at last an event of 
military interest. 

This attack shows that the Russians still keep the initiative, and 
that, up to the present moment, the Turks, allied armies and 
allied fleets, are directed by an impulse received from the enemy. 
The allied fleets are instinctively, irresistibly attracted by the 
Russian fleet in its safe retreat at Sevastopol; being unable to 
attack that stronghold without a land force, they are thus held in 
check and paralyzed by a fleet far inferior in quality and number 
of ships. Even the evacuation of the forts on the Caucasian coast, 
carried out in proper time and under the nose of the British and 
French steamers, shows the determination of the Russians to hold 
the lead as long as possible. And in war this is a great thing. It is a 
proof of superiority—whether in numbers, in quality of troops, or 
in generalship. It keeps up the morale of the soldier under all 
checks and retreats short of the loss of a decisive battle. It was this 
initiative which held together Wellington’s little army in the midst 
of hundreds of thousands of French troops in Spain, and which 
made it the center around which all the events of that five years’ 
war grouped themselves. You may be forced to retreat, you may 
suffer a repulse, but as long as you are able to give the impulse to 
the enemy instead of receiving it from him, you are still to a 
degree his superior; and what is more, your soldiers will feel 
themselves, individually and collectively, superior to his men. The 
attack upon Silistria is, besides, the first real forward movement of 
the Russians since they completed the occupation of the Danube.