When it was found that the object for which the war was undertaken--the evacuation of the Principalities--had been effected by the retreat of the Russians across the Pruth on the 28th of July, there was some fear lest the taxpayers, who were painfully digesting Mr. Gladstone’s War Budget, might consider enough had been done to bring Russia to reason. Russia, it has been shown, was now in such a position that her surrender, under the passive pressure of the Powers, was inevitable, so as a matter-of-fact enough _had_ been done. But the growth of this feeling had to be stopped, for the War Party insisted that Russia must be rendered incapable of again disturbing Europe. It was a curious revival of a policy, the practicability of which Napoleon I. had ruined himself to illustrate. Yet on the 19th of June Lord Lyndhurst invited the House of Lords to preside at its resurrection. The long, virulent, and passionate harangue by which he endeavoured to excite the hatred of England against Russia, his indictment of her as an enemy of the human race, his appeals for her destruction in the sacred interests of liberty and civilisation, drew forth cheer after cheer even from that frigid Assembly of patricians. It produced a prodigious effect on the country, and forthwith Englishmen worked themselves up into a belief that unless a mortal blow were dealt at Russia, Europe would be overrun by Cossacks, and every honest man in England would be buried alive in Siberia. Lord Aberdeen ventured to protest against Lyndhurst’s extravagant and scurrilous abuse of the Czar, and to remind the Peers that in 1829, when Turkey was at his mercy, he had not seized Turkish territory, but had been content with the Treaty of Adrianople. For this Aberdeen was denounced as a tool of Russia, who desired to patch up a hasty and dishonourable peace. [Illustration: HEIGHTS OF THE ALMA.] [Illustration: SIR JOHN BURGOYNE.]