Prussia in 1815 had been regarded as the champion of Liberalism. The Constitutionalists, however, soon discovered that the hopes which they placed in her were not destined to be realized. In the counsels of Frederick William, the influence of Wittgenstein, the leader of the reactionary party, and the friend of Metternich, soon superseded that of Stein, Hardenburg and the heroes of the War of Liberation. The conditions of the country, it must be admitted, were hardly suitable to the immediate establishment of representative institutions. The inhabitants of the nine provinces which, it had been decreed at the Congress of Vienna, were to constitute the Kingdom of Prussia, were not agreed as to the form of government under which they desired to live. Until they had become Prussians, the Poles of the Duchy of Posen, the Westphaliand, the Saxons, and the Rhinelanders had existed under different codes of law and of administration. The imposition of a uniform system upon the kingdom was a matter of urgent necessity, and it was to administrative measures that the Prussian government devoted its attention exclusively in the years which followed Waterloo. It is clear that there was no strong demand for a constitution among the mass of the people, and Frederick William III. could listen, in consequence, without much danger, to Metternich's warning that representative institutions must prove incompatible with military strength. Successful as he had been in persuading Frederick William to withhold a constitution from Prussia, Metternich could not prevent certain rulers of the minor States from complying with Article XIII. of the Federal Act, and from establishing representative government within their dominions. In 1816, the Liberal Duke of Saxe-Weimar granted a constitution, and his example was followed by the Kings of Bavaria and of Wurtemburg and the Duke of Baden. A wave of Liberalism swept over Northern Germany. The universities were affected profoundly by the new ideas. In their lecture-rooms, professors denounced existing governments and harangued their pupils in the language of demagogues. The agitation culminated, on March 23, 1819, in the murder of the dramatist and publicist Kotzebue, who was said to be in the pay of Russia, by Karl Sand, a student of Jena University and a lecturer to the _Burschenschaft_. This crime and an attempt to assassinate Ibell, the minister of Nassau, gave Metternich the opportunity for which he had been waiting. In the month of July of this same year he had an interview with Frederick William at Teplitz, in the course of which the King promised never to give Prussia a constitution, to place his confidence only in ministers of the type of Bernstorff and Wittgenstein, and to sanction such repressive measures as the Austrian Chancellor might see fit to suggest. After a conference of the ministers of the different States at Carlsbad, Metternich's decrees were submitted to the Frankfort Diet, on September 20, 1819, and