London, 14 September. “Peals of bells and thunder of cannon”—that is the watchword of the day in England. The sky is hung with fiddles and every somewhat considerable building, public or private, is hung with Anglo-French flags. The same scene in Manchester as in London, despite the “Manchester school”; in Edinburgh as in Manchester, despite Scottish philosophy. Nothing is at this moment capable of putting down the general intoxication, not even the extraordinary list of casualties telegraphed to London. The defeat of the English before the Redan and the capture of the decisive point, the Malakhov, by the French—this contrast alone mars the shouts of victory and sets some bounds to the boastfulness. Whoever shares the old prejudice—a prejudice that we, along with many others, owe to the uncritical confusion of modern with ancient social conditions—the prejudice that industry and commerce destroy the warlike character of a people, can now in England, even in Manchester, its industrial metropolis, be taught the contrary. The matter is very simple. Among the moderns, if not the wealth of the individual, at any rate the national wealth increases with increased labour; among the ancients it increased with the increased idleness of the nation. Stewart, the Scottish national economist, who published his significant work ten years before Adam Smith, had already found and developed this point.

The public enthusiasm seeks in vain for nourishment in the new telegraphic dispatches. They are as meagre as the first was rich. Pélissier writes that an “immense materiel” [“immense material”] has fallen into the hands of the Allies at Sevastopol. We suspect—a quantity of old iron, which will certainly fall in price.

The turn that affairs will now take depends largely on the motives that decided the Russians to the sudden abandonment of the southern side. So much is clear. Purely tactical and strategic reasons were not part of this decision. Had Gortchakov considered the abandonment of the Karabelnaya and the town as inseparable from the fall of the Malakhov, why the enormous mass of defensive works inside the suburb? Despite the commanding position of the Malakhov, 5–6 weeks could have been gained by stubborn defence, first of the inner defensive works of the suburb and then of the town itself. Judging by the best maps, plans, and models, there existed no purely strategic or tactical reasons for the sudden abandonment of what had hitherto been so tenaciously held. Only two possible modes of explanation remain: The moral self-confidence of the Russian army was broken to a point that made it inadvisable to make another stand behind the inner defensive works of the town. Or the shortage of provisions was beginning to become perceptible, not only in the town, but also in the camp, or, finally, both together.

The almost uninterrupted series of defeats that the Russian army experienced from Oltenitza and Cetate to the Battle of the Chernaya and the assault of 8 September can only have had a demoralising effect on the besieged, all the more so as a large part of them had been witnesses of the defeats on the Danube and at Inkerman. The Russians certainly possess a dull moral sensibility and can therefore endure defeats better than other troops. But that too necessarily has its limit. A resistance prolonged over an unusually long period of time in a besieged place has a demoralising effect in and of itself. It entails sufferings, toils, lack of rest, illnesses, and the constant presence not of the acute danger that steels, but of the chronic one that breaks. The defeat at the Chernaya, in which one half of the relief army, precisely the reinforcements that were to save the southern side, was engaged, and the taking of the Malakhov, the key of the entire position—these two defeats must have completed the demoralisation. Since the Malakhov commanded the bridge to the other side and the French could destroy it at any moment, every access became problematic and retreat the last refuge of the troops. As regards the shortage of provisions, there are symptoms that it was beginning to make itself felt. The interruption of Russian navigation in the Sea of Azov confined the Russians to a single line of operations and thus shortened their supplies. The enormous difficulty of transporting food, ammunition, etc., through a thinly populated steppe naturally grew as soon as the road from Kherson alone still remained open. The means of transport, collected together by requisition from the Ukraine and the Don provinces, must have gradually been used up, and, the nearest provinces once exhausted, it became more and more difficult to replace them. This shortage of supplies must have appeared first, not in Sevastopol, where great stores were accumulated, but in the camp at Inkerman, at Bakhchisarai, and on the line of march of the reinforcements. This alone explains why the two grenadier divisions, which have been on the march for so long and are now said to be at Perekop, did not advance and take part in the battle on the Chernaya, just as, on the other hand, it explains why, despite the non-appearance of this better half of the relief troops, the battle was ventured with a force that was in no proportion to its task. If these points of view are correct, nothing indeed remained for Gortchakov but to use the capture of the Malakhov to save his garrison under a decent pretext.