How easy it is to be magnanimous to a fallen foe; how difficult, with some people, to be honourable in their dealings with an ally, especially if he has been successful where they failed! The first is a claim of superiority, and the higher the meed of praise awarded by us to the vanquished the greater appears our victory; but the less we admit to be due to our comrade in arms, the greater credit is left for ourselves. And yet what will be the judgment of posterity upon the conduct of Russia towards her brave ally who had saved her honour, if not the integrity of her empire? Whatever she may think, the joy-bells would have rung throughout a great portion of Europe, and certainly the party then dominant in England would have rejoiced exceedingly, if she had been driven back over the Pruth, and had been compelled to busy herself with much-needed reforms in her own country instead of meddling with the affairs of her neighbours and seeking to extend her already overgrown possessions.
The war was never popular with the masses in Roumania, and although, at the opening of the Chambers in November 1877, the royal speech predicted that the fall of Plevna would mean a complete emancipation for Roumania, much uneasiness prevailed concerning the designs of Russia--uneasiness which was justified by subsequent events. On December 17, a load having been lifted from the mind of the nation by the surrender of Osman Pasha, there was great rejoicing at Bucarest on the occasion of the Czar's visit. He was on his way to St. Petersburg to receive the congratulations of his subjects, having left Plevna behind him, 'full of horrors.' He is dead now, but his son and all princes who live by the sword would do well to peruse and reperuse the accounts of the tragical scenes that the victors left upon the battle-field when they departed to receive the ovations of the fickle populace. The Roumanians fêted their victorious allies, to whom it must be admitted that we have here done ample justice in all their proceedings. But they were the same Russians who, under Peter the Great, were reported to have stolen the boots from the feet of their sleeping hosts; the same whose hands the Roumanians had kissed when in 1829 they had released them from the Turkish yoke; who it 1853 overran the Principalities with a view to their permanent occupation, and who a few months after the events above recorded betrayed their allies, and, for the risk they had run of once more sacrificing their national existence, deprived them of Southern Bessarabia, a province inhabited almost entirely by Roumanians.