give time to the King to collect upon the Vistula a force as numerous as that which he had lost. But whatever is weakest in human nature--old age, fear, and credulity--seemed to have been placed at the head of Prussia's defences. The very object for which fortresses exist was forgotten; and the fact that one army had been beaten in the field was made a reason for permitting the enemy to forestall the organisation of another. Spandau surrendered on the 25th of October, Stettin on the 29th. These were places of no great strength; but the next fortress to capitulate, Küstrin on the Oder, was in full order for a long siege. It was surrendered by the older officers, amidst the curses of the subalterns and the common soldiers: the artillerymen had to be dragged from their guns by force. Magdeburg, with a garrison of 24,000 men and enormous supplies, fell before a French force not numerous enough to beleaguer it (Nov. 8). [Napoleon's demands.] Neither Napoleon himself nor any one else in Europe could have foreseen such conduct on the part of the Prussian commanders. The unexpected series of capitulations made him demand totally different terms of peace from those which he had offered after the battle of Jena. A week after the victory, Napoleon had demanded, as the price of peace, the cession of Prussia's territory west of the Elbe, with the exception of the town of Magdeburg, and the withdrawal of Prussia from the affairs of Germany. These terms were communicated to King Frederick William; he accepted them, and sent Lucchesini to Berlin to negotiate for peace upon this basis. Lucchesini had scarcely reached the capital when the tidings arrived of Hohenlohe's capitulation, followed by the surrender of Stettin and Küstrin. The Prussian envoy now sought in vain to procure Napoleon's ratification of the terms which he had himself proposed. No word of peace could be obtained: an armistice was all that the Emperor would grant, and the terms on which the armistice was offered rose with each new disaster to the Prussian arms. On the fall of Magdeburg becoming known, Napoleon demanded that the troops of Prussia should retire behind the Vistula, and surrender every fortress that they still retained, with the single exception of Königsberg. Much as Prussia had lost, it would have cost Napoleon a second campaign to make himself master of what he now asked; but to such a depth had the Prussian Government sunk, that Lucchesini actually signed a convention at Charlottenburg (November 16), surrendering to Napoleon, in return for an armistice, the entire list of uncaptured fortresses, including Dantzig and Thorn on the Lower Vistula, Breslau, with the rest of the untouched defences of Silesia, Warsaw and Praga in Prussian Poland, and Colberg upon the Pomeranian coast. [133] [Frederick William continues the war.]