against “the infidel” and his abettors. The result may be seen in the personal popularity which the Emperor enjoys, and the ready devotion with which his efforts are aided by the Christian portion of the population of his empire. On the other hand, Great Britain enters into the struggle with every recognised prestige of success in her favour. She has, as her active ally, the greatest military nation in the world, whose soldiers and sailors are about, for the first time for many centuries, to fight side by side against a common enemy. Little as we are disposed to decry the strength of that navy which Russia, by her wonderful energy, has succeeded in creating during the past few years, it would be absurd to compare it with the magnificent fleets which England and France combined have at present floating in the waters of the Black Sea, and about to sail for the Baltic. A comparison of our monetary resources with those of our opponent would be still more absurd. Another feature in our position as a maritime country at present, is the vast facilities which we possess, by means of our mercantile ocean steamers, of transporting any required number of troops to the locality where their services are required, with a rapidity and comfort never dreamt of during the last European war. A veteran of our Peninsular Campaigns, witnessing the splendid accommodation provided in such noble vessels as the Oriental Company’s steamer _Himalaya_ at Southampton, the Cunard Company’s steamer _Cambria_ at Kingston Harbour, Dublin, and the same Company’s steamer _Niagara_ at Liverpool, and acquainted with the fact that each of these vessels was capable of disembarking their freight of armed men within five or six days of their departure hence in any port of the Mediterranean, must have been struck by the marked difference between such conveyances and the old troop ships employed in former days. Moreover, there is scarcely a limit to the extent of this new element of our power as a military nation. We enter, too, upon the approaching struggle with Russia backed by the enthusiastic support of all classes of our population. It is not regarded with us as a religious war, or one into the incentives to which religion enters at all. It is scarcely regarded by the mass as a war of interest. With that sordid motive we cannot as a nation be reproached. It is felt only that an unjust aggression has been committed by a powerful state upon a weak one; that the tyranny of the act has been aggravated by the gross breaches of faith, the glaring hypocrisy, amounting to blasphemy, and the unparalleled atrocity, by which it has been followed up; and that we should prove ourselves recreant, and devoid of all manhood, were we to stand tamely by and see a gallant people, differing though they do from us in religion, overwhelmed by brute force, and exterminated from the face of Europe by such butcheries as Russia has shown us, in the