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134 the Diet should overstep its powers, and pass some resolution which Prussia could not accept, so that Prussia could take up the glove and force a breach. The opportunity was favourable for a revision of the Constitution. "I see," he wrote "in our Federal connection only a weakness of Prussia which sooner or later must be cured, ferro et igni." Probably Schleinitz's answer was not of such a kind as to tempt him to write again. In his private letters he harps on the same string; he spent June in a visit to Moscow but he hurried back at the end of the month to St. Petersburg to receive news of the war. Before news had come of the peace of Villafranca he was constantly in dread that Prussia would go to war on behalf of Austria:

"We have prepared too soon and too thoroughly, the the weight of the burden we have taken on ourselves is drawing us down the incline. We shall not be even an Austrian reserve; we shall simply sacrifice ourselves for Austria and take away the war from her."

How disturbed he was, we can see by the tone of religious resignation which he assumes—no doubt a sign that he fears his advice has not yet been acted upon.

"As God will. Everything here is only a question of time; peoples and men, wisdom and folly, war and peace, they come and go like rain and water, and the sea alone remains. There is nothing on earth but hypocrisy and deceit."

The language of this and other letters was partly