Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol 7.djvu/373

 THE DEMEANOUR OF ENGLAND. 329 if he could, any fault iu either their facts or CHAP, their reasoning, (l^^) ^^' The Board followed, and indeed reinforced the And on the M'Neill and Tulloch Eeport which had dealt ti"oroad."' with the question of ' the road.'(i°^) There were thus altogether three tribunals which suc- cessively determined that (consistently with per- severance in the military operations) the road could not have been made by our troops ; and the two last of those three tribunals determined besides, that the want of ' hands ' could not have been supplied by attempting to hire them. If this solemn tribunal had closed without showing where blame ought to rest, its conclu- sions, after three months of labour, must have seemed disappointing and lame. But no such miscarriage took place; for by this time, abun- dant testimony had not only brought the whole The now controversy into a state ripe for judgment, but ™wed''' had also, as the Board conceived, traced up the couuovursy main cause of the ' avertible ' ills to a great State the cauae^^os Department at Westminster. 'tfue^sJif. The ' Sebastopol Committee ' had laboured ^'""^'• under the immense disadvantage of not being able to examine the generals of our Headquarter Staff, or even the one man whose teaching upon the question of supply was plainly lieyond meas- ure important — that is, Mr Filder, the Commis- sary-General ; (1^7) but the tribunal sitting at Chelsea encountered no such obstacle. Supplied with the huge mass of testimony which the Sebastopol Committee had elicited, and the ad- mirable elucidations resulting from Lord Sey