The constitution arranged for the Grand Duchy, also, was such as was not liable to lead to disturbances among those provinces of Poland which were united with Austria and Russia. Slavery was abolished, and the equality of legal rights among all ranks of citizens was acknowledged. The Grand Duke held the executive power. A Senate, or Upper House, of eighteen members, and a Lower House of nuncios, or deputies, amounting to a hundred, passed into laws, or rejected at their pleasure, such propositions as the Duke laid before them. But the Diets, the Pospolite, the _Liberum Veto_, and all the other turbulent privileges of the Polish nobles, continued abolished, as they had been under the Prussian government. Buonaparte made it his boast that he had returned the Prussian territories, not to the House of Brandenburgh, but to Alexander; so that if Frederick William yet reigned, it was only, he said, by the friendship of Alexander,--"a term," he added, "which he himself did not recognise in the vocabulary of sovereigns, under the head of state affairs." Alexander, however, was not altogether so disinterested as Buonaparte, with something like a sneer, thus seemed to insinuate. There was excepted from the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, and added to the territory of Russia at the expense of Prussia, the province of Bialystock, serving materially to improve the frontier of the empire. Thus the Czar, in some degree, profited by the distress of his ally. The apology for his conduct must rest, first, on the strength of the temptation to stretch his empire towards the Vistula, as a great natural boundary; secondly, on the plea, that if he had declined the acquisition from a point of delicacy, Saxony, not Prussia would have profited by his self-denial, as the territory of Bialystock would, in that event, have gone to augment the Duchy of Warsaw. Russia ceded the lordship of Jever to Holland, as an ostensible compensation for her new acquisition.[289] Dantzic, with a certain surrounding territory, was, by the treaty of Tilsit, recognised as a free city, under the protection of Prussia and Saxony. There can be little doubt, that the farther provision, that France should occupy the town until the conclusion of a maritime peace, was intended to secure, for the use of Napoleon, a place of arms, so important in case of a new breach betwixt him and Russia. It followed, as a matter of course, that the Emperor Alexander and the King of Prussia ratified all the changes which Napoleon had wrought on Europe, acknowledged the thrones which he had erected, and recognised the leagues which he had formed. On the other hand, out of deference to the Emperor, Buonaparte consented that the Dukes of Saxe-Coburg, Oldenburg, and Mecklenburg-Schwerin, German princes connected with Alexander, should remain in possession of their territories; the French, however, continuing to occupy the seaports of the two countries last named, until a final peace betwixt France and England.