What was bad in the higher grades of the army was not retrieved by any excellence on the part of the private soldier. The Prussian army was recruited in part from foreigners, but chiefly from Prussian serfs, who were compelled to serve. Men remained with their regiments till old age; the rough character of the soldiers and the frequency of crimes and desertions occasioned the use of brutal punishments, which made the military service an object of horror to the better part of the middle and lower classes. The soldiers themselves, who could be flogged and drilled into high military perfection by a great general like Frederick, felt a surly indifference to their present taskmasters, and were ready to desert in masses to their homes as soon as a defeat broke up the regimental muster and roll-call. A proposal made in the previous year to introduce that system of general service which has since made Prussia so great a military power was rejected by a committee of generals, on the ground that it "would convert the most formidable army of Europe into a militia." But whether Prussia entered the war with a militia or a regular army, under the men who held command in 1806 it could have met with but one fate. Neither soldiery nor fortresses could have saved a kingdom whose generals knew only how to capitulate. [Southern Germany. Execution of Palm, Aug. 26.] All southern Germany was still in Napoleon's hands. As the probability of a war with Prussia became greater and greater, Napoleon had tightened his grasp upon the Confederate States. Publications originating among the patriotic circles of Austria were beginning to appeal to the German people to unite against a foreign oppressor. An anonymous pamphlet, entitled "Germany in its Deep Humiliation," was sold by various booksellers in Bavaria, among others by Palm, a citizen of Nuremberg. There is no evidence that Palm was even acquainted with the contents of the pamphlet; but as in the case of the Duke of Enghien, two years before, Napoleon had required a victim to terrify the House of Bourbon, so now he required a victim to terrify those who among the German people might be inclined to listen to the call of patriotism. Palm was not too obscure for the new Charlemagne. The innocent and unoffending man, innocent even of the honourable crime of attempting to save his country, was dragged before a tribunal of French soldiers, and executed within twenty-four hours, in pursuance of the imperative orders of Napoleon (August 26). The murder was an unnecessary one, for the Bavarians and the Würtembergers were in fact content with the yoke they bore; its only effect was to arouse among a patient and home-loving class the doubt whether the German citizen and his family might not after all have some interest in the preservation of national independence. [Austria neutral. England and Russia can give Prussia no prompt help.]