Pitt was succeeded in the Ministry by his great rival Fox, the professed admirer of the French Revolution, a man whose measure Napoleon thought he had taken, and whom the Emperor believed he could dupe with fine phrases about universal brotherhood and a union of hearts. Napoleon instantly saw the advantage this change might bring to him. With audacity unparalleled, except by himself, he commenced negotiations with the English Government and offered _them_ Hanover, notwithstanding that the ink was hardly dry on the treaty in which he had offered it to Prussia. Napoleon, intent for the moment on this fresh project of pacifying England, received Haugwitz, when he presented his master’s modifications of the treaty, with harsh and contemptuous insolence. The conditions of the treaty were made still more onerous than before on Prussia. Napoleon now wanted to force a quarrel between England and Prussia, of which he himself would in any result reap the advantages. He carried on this project for a time so successfully that England did actually declare war against Prussia, but hostilities between them never actually took place, because it became evident that Prussia had only been a cat’s paw in the hand of Napoleon. The new treaty which Napoleon returned to Frederick William was so humiliating to Prussia, that Haugwitz did not dare to take it to Berlin himself, but sent it by another hand. The King was so weak and foolish as to sign it, and from that moment Napoleon poured insult after insult upon the unhappy government which had consented to its own slavery. One of his first acts was to insist on the dismissal of Hardenberg, one of the most trusted of the Prussian ministers. Under the pretext of a new Confederation of the Rhine, it became evident that Napoleon meant to entirely alter the whole constitution of Germany without consulting Prussia, or any of the Powers chiefly concerned. The French ambassador had orders to state that “his master no longer recognised the Germanic constitution.” Under these new humiliations, the war fever burst out more strongly than ever, all over Prussia. Unequal as the contest was, all that was best in the nation preferred any risk to the humble acceptance of the galling tyranny that oppressed them. The young men in Berlin showed what their feelings were by assembling in crowds outside the house of the French ambassador, and sharpening their swords on his doorstep and window sills.