Nor have the statesmen of France failed to threaten Germany with a Russo-Gallic alliance in the spirit of the Erfurt congress of 1808; while Russia perseveres in the prohibitory system so prejudicial to German commerce, attempts to suppress every spark of German nationality in Livonia, Courland, and Esthonia, and fosters Panslavism, or the union of all the Slavonic nations for the subjection of the world, among the Slavonian subjects of Austria in Hungaria and Bohemia. The extension of the Greek church is also connected with this idea. "The European Pentarchy," a work that attracted much attention in 1839, insolently boasts how Russia, in defiance of Austria, has seized the mouths of the Danube, has wedged herself, as it were, by means of Poland, between Austria and Prussia, in a position equally threatening to both, recommends the minor states of Germany to seek the protection of Russia, and darkly hints at the alliance between that power and France. Nor are the prospects of Germany alone threatened by France and Russia; disturbances, like a fantastic renewal of the horrors of the Middle Age, are ready to burst forth on the other side of the Alps, as though, according to the ancient saga of Germany, the dead were about to rise in order to mingle in the last great contest between the gods and mankind. CCLXXII. Prussia and Rome While Austria remains stationary, Prussia progresses. While Austria relies for support upon the aristocracy of the Estates, Prussia relies for hers upon the people, that is to say, upon the public officers taken from the mass of the population, upon the citizens emancipated by the city regulation, upon the peasantry emancipated by the abolition of servitude, of all the other agricultural imposts, and by the division of property, and upon the enrolment of both classes in the Landwehr. While Austria, in fine, renders her German policy subordinate to her European diplomacy, the influence exercised by Prussia upon Europe depends, on the contrary, solely upon that possessed by her in Germany. Prussia's leading principle appears to be, "All for the people, nothing through the people!" Hence the greatest solicitude for the instruction of the people, whether in the meanest schools or the universities, but under strict political control, under the severest censorship; hence the emancipation of the peasantry, civic self- administration, freedom of trade, the general arming of the people, and, with all these, mere nameless provincial diets, the most complete popular liberty on the widest basis without a representation worthy of the name; hence, finally, the greatest solicitude for the promotion of trade on a grand scale, for the revival of the commerce of Germany, which has lain prostrate since the great wars of the Reformation, for the mercantile unity of Germany, while it is exactly in Prussia that political Unitarians are the most severely punished.