adopted forthwith. Under the provisions of the celebrated _Carlsbad decrees_, the ruler of every German State was bound to appoint commissioners to regulate the universities and to impose a censorship upon all newspapers and matter printed within his dominions. Furthermore, a central tribunal was established at Mainz to inquire into the doings of the secret societies, and upon the members of this court was conferred the power of arresting the subjects of any German sovereign, and of demanding from any law court the production of documents. These decrees, however, did not constitute the sum total of Metternich's measures of precaution. In November, 1819, he convened a council of German ministers at Vienna, when, under the pretext of defining the functions of the Diet, sixty-five new articles of a repressive character were introduced into the Federal Act. The general effect of the _Vienna resolutions_, as these measures were termed, was to impose upon the Federation the duty of defending absolutism by force of arms in small States in which the sovereigns might prove incapable themselves of maintaining a despotic form of government. Metternich's manipulation of the Diet was the great triumph of his home policy. By converting the Federation from a combination of States into a league of sovereigns against their own subjects, he averted the danger that it might promote the cause of Liberalism or of national unity. From this time forward Metternich, to all appearance, dominated the Court and the Cabinet of Berlin, and held in leading strings the minor princes of the Confederation. Nevertheless, the position of Austria as a German Power was weakening steadily. At the Congress of Vienna he had craftily withdrawn the empire from the post of danger, and had thrust upon Prussia the task of protecting the western flank of Germany. To his secret satisfaction, he saw her pour out her treasure to defend the frontier from which Austria had recoiled. He believed that by his _Carlsbad decrees_ and his _Vienna resolutions_ he had rendered national unity impossible, and had condemned Northern Germany to the political stagnation in which the empire appeared contented to repose. But the enlightened bureaucratic system of Prussia was incomparably superior to that of Austria. In educational matters she was the foremost State in Europe, and already she was drawing the minor States into her system of internal free trade--the famous _Zollverein_ which was to prove so important a factor in the struggle for Prussian hegemony and national unity. Even in 1830, acute observers could perceive that the people were stifling within the narrow confines of their duchies, and that, when the day of Germany's awakening should come, it would be to the Power standing on guard upon the Rhine that they would look for leadership.[20] But that hour had not yet struck, and, in the question of the attitude to be observed towards France, after the Revolution of July, Prussia, as