London, June 16. The debate on Layard’s motion *” was not 
concluded yesterday but adjourned until Monday evening. So 
we Shall also adjourn our account of it for the tume being. 

One incident in the Commons sitting deserves mention.* During 
the talks about the Vienna Conference Palmerston had intimated 
that the Peelites had made the stipulation of certain peace terms a 
condition for their entry into his Cabinet. Russell defended these 
same terms in Vienna. Yesterday Otway called on Palmerston to 
state whether he was adhering to peace terms that had originated 
from the Peelites, in other words from a party confessedly acting 
in the interests of Russia. Gladstone rose and demanded that the 
speaker accusing him and his friends of treason should be called to 
order. The call to order was made. Otway, however, repeated his 
description of the Peelites and his question to Palmerston. As is his 
custom, Palmerston refused to reply. The peace terms were 
naturally dependent on the events of the war. As regards the 
Peelites, they had in particular stipulated that a ‘“certain”’ 
condition, which he could not name, would not be made a conditio 
sine qua non of peace. In his reply to Palmerston, Gladstone for his 
part denied ever having had talks with Palmerston about the peace 
terms. It might be otherwise with his friend Graham. Moreover, 
he protested against Palmerston’s system of affected official 
reserve on the one side, and the concealed hint, ambiguous 

Times, No. 22082, June 16, 1855.— Ed. 

allusion and quasi-statement on the other. Let the ministry speak 
out frankly or be silent. Gladstone administered this lesson to 
Palmerston with sanctimonious bitterness. 

The French government has issued in the Constitutionnel a new 
exposé of the conduct of the war in the coming months.* These 
exposés have now become not only fashionable but also regular. 
Although in profound contradiction with themselves, they are 
valuable as revelations of “various” plans of campaign devised 
against Russia by Louis Bonaparte. They are valuable insofar as 
they document the disappearance of one Bonapartist illusion after 
the other. The first plan was that of “grand war” by means of the 
Austrian alliance, with 500,000 Austrians and 100,000 Frenchmen 
on the Vistula and the Dnieper. The plan would have assigned to 
the French Army the same numerically subordinate relationship to 
the Austrians as the English have to the French in the Crimea. It 
would have conceded the revolutionary initiative to Russia. Austria 
refused to act. The plan was dropped. The second plan was the 
“war of nationalities”, a general rising of the “oppressed, who 
are constantly looking to the West”. It would have provoked a 
storm between the Germans, Italians and Hungarians on the one 
side, and the Slav insurrection on the other. Recoiling on France, 
it would have threatened the “second” Empire with its end. The 
imitation “man of iron” shrank back from it. The plan was 
dropped. All this is now over and done with. Austria has done its 
duty, Prussia has done its duty, the whole world has done its duty, 
and Bonaparte has come to the third and most modest plan. 
“Local war for local aims.” The French troops in the Crimea are 
not fighting for glory, they are merely there on police duty. The 
question to be settled is a purely local one: predominance in the 
Black Sea, and it must be cleared up there, on the spot. It would 
be foolishness to give the war wider dimensions. “Respectfully but 
firmly” the allies will crush any Russian attempt to resist them in 
the Black Sea, and then they or the Russians or both will make 
peace. Nothing is left of the high-sounding phrases, not even the 
phrase about civilisation, nothing but the fight for the 3rd point” 
of the Vienna Protocol. War with a purely local aim, remarks the 
imperial oracle, can only be waged with local means. Deprive the 
Russians simply of their predominance in the Black Sea! In our 
next letter we shall show” that Bonaparte has descended from 

“grand war” to the “war of the nationalities’, and from the “war 
of nationalities” to “local war serving local purposes and waged 

with local means’, and this final war becomes “preposterous”.