consequences of the Berlin Decree were delayed until the retaliation of Great Britain reached the dimensions of Napoleon's own tyranny, the Decree itself marked on the part of Napoleon the assumption of a power in conflict with the needs and habits of European life. Like most of the schemes of Napoleon subsequent to the victories of 1806, it transgressed the limits of practical statesmanship, and displayed an ambition no longer raised above mere tyranny by its harmony with forms of progress and with the better tendencies of the age. [Napoleon and the Poles.] Immediately after signing the Berlin Decree, Napoleon quitted the Prussian capital (Nov. 25). The first act of the war had now closed. The Prussian State was overthrown; its territory as far as the Vistula lay at the mercy of the invader; its King was a fugitive at Königsberg, at the eastern extremity of his dominions. The second act of the war began with the rejection of the armistice which had been signed by Lucchesini, and with the entry of Russia into the field against Napoleon. The scene of hostilities was henceforward in Prussian Poland and in the Baltic Province lying between the lower Vistula and the Russian frontier. Napoleon entered Poland, as he had entered Italy ten years before, with the pretence of restoring liberty to an enslaved people. Kosciusko's name was fraudulently attached to a proclamation summoning the Polish nation to arms; and although Kosciusko himself declined to place any trust in the betrayer of Venice, thousands of his countrymen flocked to Napoleon's standard, or anticipated his arrival by capturing and expelling the Prussian detachments scattered through their country. Promises of the restoration of Polish independence were given by Napoleon in abundance; but the cause of Poland was the last to attract the sympathy of a man who considered the sacrifice of the weak to the strong to be the first principle of all good policy. To have attempted the restoration of Polish independence would have been to make permanent enemies of Russia and Prussia for the sake of an ally weaker than either of them. The project was not at this time seriously entertained by Napoleon. He had no motive to face a work of such enormous difficulty as the creation of a solid political order among the most unpractical race in Europe. He was glad to enrol the Polish nobles among his soldiers; he knew the value of their enthusiasm, and took pains to excite it; but, when the battle was over, it was with Russia, not Poland, that France had to settle; and no better fate remained, even for the Prussian provinces of Poland, than in part to be formed into a client-state, in part to be surrendered as a means of accommodation with the Czar. [Campaign in Poland against Russia, Dec., 1806.]