Catherine of Russia, however, no sooner beheld Prussia and Austria engaged in a war with France, than she commenced her operations against Poland, declared the new Polish constitution French and Jacobinical, notwithstanding its abolition of the _liberum veto_ and its extension of the prerogatives of the crown, and, taking advantage of the king's absence from Prussia, speedily regained possession of the country. What was Frederick William's policy in this dilemma? He was strongly advised to make peace with France, to throw himself at the head of the whole of his forces into Poland, and to set a limit to the insolence of the autocrat; but--he feared, should he abandon the Rhine, the extension of the power of Austria in that quarter, and-- calculating that Catherine, in order to retain his friendship, would cede to him a portion of her booty,[1] unhesitatingly broke the faith he had just plighted with the Poles, suddenly took up Catherine's tone, declared the constitution he had so lately ratified Jacobinical, and despatched a force under Mollendorf into Poland in order to secure possession of his stipulated prey. By the second partition of Poland, which took place as rapidly, as violently, and, on account of the assurances of the Prussian monarch, far more unexpectedly than the first, Russia received the whole of Lithuania, Podolia, and the Ukraine, and Prussia, Thorn and Dantzig, besides Southern Prussia (Posen and Calisch). Austria, at that time fully occupied with France, had no participation in this robbery, which was, as it were, committed behind her back. Affairs had worn a remarkably worse aspect since the campaign of 1792. The French had armed themselves with all the terrors of offended nationalism and of unbounded, intoxicating liberty. All the enemies of the Revolution within the French territory were mercilessly exterminated, and hundreds of thousands were sacrificed by the guillotine, a machine invented for the purpose of accelerating the mode of execution. The king was beheaded in this manner in the January of 1793, and the queen shared a similar fate in the ensuing October.[2] While Robespierre directed the executions, Carnot undertook to make preparations for war, and, in the very midst of this immense fermentation, calmly converted France into an enormous camp, and more than a million Frenchmen, as if summoned by magic from the clod, were placed under arms.