The Sun.
London, England, 1854-06-22 00:00:00

tbg

LONDON, THURSDAY, JUNE 22, 1854.

If matters go on at the seat of war as they
have been going on there recently, little enough
will be left, by the Turks and Egyptians, to be
accomplished by the British and. French auxiliaries.
.Alone--the soldiers of the SULTAN have been en-
abled, thanks to their own " pluck," and the good
generalship of their Commander-in-Chief, alone
they have been enabled to withstand the enormous
pressure of the vast military armaments directed
against them by the imperious will of the AUTOGRAT.
Turkey haanot, of course, been enabled to prevent
the passage of the Pruth or the Danube by her
Russian antagonists. Au advantage of that kind
could not well have been gained by the troops
despatched. by the Sublime Porte for the defence
of its isolated frontiers. It was so to speak a
political and geographical impossibility. The
natural barrier of the Turkish Empire, or rather
what is at once its head and heart—the capital
of its. European dominions—being obviously no
other than the mighty range of the Balkan Moun-
tains. Wherefore the passage of the Pruth, and
even the passage of the Danube, became from this
point of view a matter of really secondary
consideration. Beyond the channel of the two
rivers, after having traversed Moldavia and Wal-
lachia, and a considerable portion also of Bulga-
ria, the invader would have to encounter the
valiant troops of OMER PACHA at bay, as it were,
in their final fastnesses. This was remembered
by the Ottoman Government with a sense now of
consolation and now of encouragement. It was
. not forgotten, we may be sure, by the haughty
councils of St. Petersburg—borne in recollection,
too, without donbt, and this may be with feelings
of dread, or, at any rate, of some not inconsider-
able solicitude, by the Leaders of the advancing
lAnscovites—first of all by Prince GORTSCHAKOFF,
and afterwards by Prince PASKIRWITCH. How-
ever this may have been there, every intelligent
observer of the war all along has felt, there, iu
the rear of the whole lino of the Turkish army,
has stood, rooted in the eternal hills, in tle,
.dzedal bases of the Balkan range the last resource
of the Ottoman armaments,
even if pressed hard
by the numerically
superior forces of their assail-
ants, if driven back in spite of every
of the effort
to retain their, position along the right bank
' after a series of deplorable
Danube, until assisted at length,
supreme hour of extremit delays and
in their
on the scene of contest of the y, by the tardy
appearance
long-
awaited Anglo-French contingent. A
recollec-
'Lion of all this we cannot
prescient
but think, mustst
have
eroic heart and
carried solace to the h
judgMent of OMER PAC HA, at moments when
the West may have ap-
the advent of aid from
peared most remote, and when at the same time
the accumulation of dangers from the side of
the Northern foe appeared
most imminent
inpirited
edge
by
aud threatening. Consoled ;and sknow
these reflections, no less than by a
l
of the justice of their own cause, the Turks have
contrived hitherto to their own credit, and even
to the glory of their arms, to bear the brunt of
the unequal contest, unassisted except by the
troops -of _their Egyptian auxiliaries. So that
even by the dawn of the summer of 1854 they
have not found it necessary to withdraw their
line of defence to that afforded them by Nature
in the gorges and acclivities of the Balkan moun-
tains. So tbat their own good swords, and
their own brawny arms, and their own pa-
triotic combination of daring and endurance,
and not merely a range of scarcely-accessible
fortifications, have constituted up to this present
month of June the shield from Russian rapacity
of Adrianople, and beyond that of Constantinople.
Not merely so—s-but actually it has come to pass