The Sun.
London, England, 1855-12-28 00:00:00

( Fran& the Times of this day.)
The fall of Kars has bad, at any rate, this good
result,—that it has at last drawn public attention
ta the, theatre of those operations to, which it hail
succumbed, and taught us the importance attached
by a vigilant and skilful enemy, thoroughly ac-
quainted both with the ground and the people, to
a remote position, with which the British public
has scarcely cared to make itself acquainted. No-
body can doubt the vast importance attached by
the Czar to the preservation of Sebastopol and of
the fleet which sleeps beneath the waters of its har-
bour. The unceasing exertions and dreadful sacri-
fices of Russia attest it only too well. To save the
place was the point of honour of the empire—the
one object, compared with which all others seemed
puny and insignificant. Yet, even in this crisis of
his destiny, the Emperor of Russia could despatch
probably his best General and an army whose
bravery is only too well attested by its enormous
and almost incredible losses on the 29th of Septem-
ber, not to defend his own frontier, but make a
hostile inroad into the Turkish territory, and to
possess himself of a city situated in a mountainous
region and exposed to an inclement climate. So
eager was Mouravieff for the prize, and so deter-
mined to win at all costs, that so soon as he heard
of the fall of Sebastopol, attributing to the allied
Generals a degree of foresight and activity
which they were very far indeed from possessing,
he deemed it necessary to anticipate, at whatever
cost, the expedition they were sure to make, and
so sustained a repulse which cost him a third of his
army. Had he known the easy and comfortable
tactics of the allies he might have saved his men,
and taken the city just as well ; but it would be
ungracious to blame an enemy for thinking better
of us than we deserve.

What now presses for consideration is whether
we are tamely to sit down with this loss ; whether
that which the Russian General has gained through
our negligence he is to be allowed to keep through
our supineness and want of enterprise. If we are
not to have peace we must seek out some vulner-
able point in which we may strike Russia between
the joints of her armour,—some place in which a
victory may give us something more than a barren
'triumph, and draw after it other results than inter-
minable catalogues of killed and wounded. Whiles
Sebastopol was untaken we considered it so indis-
putably the first object of the war that we were
well satisfied to sacrifice everything else to its at-
tainment. The struggle was so gigantic, our in-
terests and. our honour were so obviously at stake,
that no success, however groat, could compensate
us for any delay or any failure there. But, Sebas-
topol once taken, a campaign in the Crimea has
no other object than the capture or destruction
of the Russian troops encamped within the penin-
sula. The Crimea itself, except as a battle-ground,
is utterly worthless, and wo are only justified in
remaining there on the supposition that there we
can inflict more serious wounds on. Russia_ than
elsewhere. -- Whether this be so or not we cannot
judge. Unless the coming campaign is to open
with a spirit and a brilliancy very different from
the close of its predecessor, 200,000 men could not
be more entirely thrown away than in occupying
the plateau between Kamiesh and Balaklava. Of
this, at any rate, we may feel confident—that an
expeditionary army can well be spared to-coperate
with Omer Pasha in the Transcaucasian provinces,
and to redeem the fallen honour of the allies in the
estimation of the semi-civilised Courts of Asia.
We are making war as much against Russian pres-
tige as Russian power, and cannot afford to allow
her, by easy Asiatic successes, to obliterate the
effect of European defeats inflicted upon her at so
tremendous a cost. We know not what other fisld
is left for our enterprise. To march into the deso-
late interior would be to follow the steps of
Charles XII. and Sweden to certain destruction.
The capture of Nicolaieff may hardly repay its cost
while we hold the -narrow pas-age through which
alone the ships built at its dockyards can find
their way into the sea ; but in the rich and beau-
tiful valley that lies between the opposing ranges
of the Caucasus and Ararat, with its glittering
streams, its emerald meadows, its waving beech
woods, its snow-capped mountains, we have a land
peculiarly adapted for the operations of an Euro-
pean force. In the north towards the Kouban are
Mussulman tribes who, it is supposed, would fly to
arms if a Turkish division were sent among them, and
the banks of the Phasis and the Cyrus are inhabited
by races who would gladly welcome and heartily sup-
port a Christian deliverer. To cut off the garrison
of Kars from all communication with Russia, to
close the passes of the Caucasus, to scale the ascent
which leads to the tableland of Georgia, to drive
the Russians before us through Teflis to the very
shores of the Caspian Sea, are enterprises the re-
sults of which would be enormous, but the difficulty
of which would be by no means so great as those
over which we have already triumphed. Resting
on our fleet and a friendly population as a secure
basis of operations, it would be easy for the allies
to wrest from the hands of the Russians the com-
mand of the Caspian Sea, and to restore to Persia
that of which Russia has deprived her—the right
of navigating what must in all fairness be considered
her waters. Either we must be prepared to enter
on some such enterprise as this, or to leave the
Emperor in possession of his present conquests, and
in a condition to push them further so soon as lie
shall be relieved from the vast concentration of his
forces which the contest for the possession of Sebas-
topol had rendered necessary. The affairs of Asia
cannot be left as they aro ; there, and there alone,
Russia is still able to assume the offensive, and will
infallibly attain more, unless we take away from
her that which she now has.
Lot it not be supposed that in suggesting a cam-
paign in the Transcaucasian provinces we are
actuated by any desire meanly and selfishly to
employ the rower of France to carry out merely
English objects ; we repeat what we have so
often said—that we have no fear whatever from
Russia for our Indian empire. Nothing that she
has done in this war raises our opinion of her as an
aggressive Power, and in India she would be en-1
couutered by a combination of obstacles far more
formidable than any which she has hitherto been
called upon to surmount. We have no wish to in-
volve ourselves in the maze of Central Asian in-
trigues. We have no wish for any increase of
territory to the north of the Himalayas. All our
objects would be strictly common to us with our
ally. We wish to strike Russia in the most vul-
nerable point. We wish to oppose to her future
aggression the rugged barrier of the Caucasus and
the still more rugged valour of its tribes. We
wish to prevent her from practising upon Persia
those arts and those menaces which so nearly suc-
ceeded against Turkey. We are no more disposed
to tolerate her presence at Teheran than at Con.
stantinople or Harnmerfest. We would not allow
Russia to turn the left flank of Turkey by the
Balkan—we must not permit her to turn the right,
which now lies open to her by way of the valleys
of the Tigris and the Euphrates. We have stopped
her external commerce ; it is time we applied a
tourniquet to her main artery,—the vast flood of
the Volga. These things must be done, not in the
interest of England alone, but in that of the world.
A solid peace can only be founded on the conviction
of the power of the Allies, and that conviction will
then be most surely produced when we employ our
strength at those points, not where our enemy is
most, but where he is least, prepared to receive us.

The Phicre de la Manche announces that 30,000 or
40,000 men will probably ba encamped this winter i❑
the neighbourhood of Cherbourg for the purpose of
being embarked next spring for the Russian Baltic pro-
vinces. The establishment of another camp of 20,000
men, near Brest, is aka talked of.