Had England and Holland shared William's temper he would have insisted on the succession of the Electoral Prince to the whole Spanish dominions. But both were weary of war, and of the financial distress which war had brought with it. In England the peace of Ryswick was at once followed by the reduction of the army at the demand of the House of Commons to ten thousand men; and a clamour had already begun for the disbanding even of these. It was necessary therefore to bribe the two rival claimants to a waiver of their claims; and Lewis after some hesitation yielded to the counsels of his Ministers, and consented to waive his son's claims for such a bribe. The secret treaty between the three powers, which was concluded in the summer of 1698, thus became necessarily a Partition Treaty. The succession of the Electoral Prince of Bavaria was recognized on condition of the cession by Spain of its Italian possessions to his two rivals. The Milanese was to pass to the Emperor; the Two Sicilies, with the border province of Guipuzcoa, to France. But the arrangement was hardly concluded when the death of the Bavarian prince in February 1699 made the Treaty waste paper. Austria and France were left face to face; and a terrible struggle, in which the success of either would be equally fatal to the independence of Europe, seemed unavoidable. The peril was the greater that the temper of both England and Holland left William without the means of backing his policy by arms. The suffering which the war had caused to the merchant class and the pressure of the debt and taxation it entailed were waking every day a more bitter resentment in the people of both countries. While the struggle lasted the value of English exports had fallen from four millions a year to less than three, and the losses of ships and goods at sea had been enormous. Nor had the stress been less felt within the realm. The revenue from the post-office, a fair index to the general wealth of the country, had fallen from seventy-six thousand to fifty-eight. With the restoration of peace indeed the energies of the country had quickly recovered from the shock. In the five years after the Peace of Ryswick the exports doubled themselves; the merchant-shipping was quadrupled; and the revenue of the post-office rose to eighty-two thousand pounds. But such a recovery only produced a greater disinclination to face again the sufferings of a renewed state of war. [Sidenote: The second Partition Treaty.]