internal tranquillity, and safeguard the Fatherland against France. The arrangement implied the co-operation of two Powers; one purely German, yet subordinate; the other parcel German, and mainly consisting of divers peoples outside Germany; and it fell to pieces at a blow, because the time had arrived when one of the two must attain supremacy. Side by side with the secular dynastic conflict arose in the nation that longing for unity which could only be accomplished by a thoroughly German Power. That Power was Prussia, trained for the task by the steadfast labours of two hundred years. The army she had formed did its work swiftly. Pouring through Saxony and over the Silesian Mountains, the King and his son, July 3rd, crushed the Austrians, on the memorable field of Sadowa, near Königgrätz. The Hanoverian troops, after winning the fight at Langensalza, had been obliged to surrender, and in South Germany the army employed to overcome the Confederates was equally victorious. On the 22nd of July, so swiftly had the main body moved, the Prussians were in front of Vienna and Presburg on the Danube. Four days afterwards, the Emperor Napoleon having struck in with an offer of mediation, which was accepted, the preliminaries of a peace were signed at Nikolsburg, on the 26th of July, and the final treaty was settled and ratified at Prague, on the 23rd of August, long after King William and his formidable Minister were once more in Berlin. By this instrument, Austria was excluded from Germany; a Northern Confederation, reaching to the Main, was founded; Hanover, the Elbe Duchies, Hesse-Cassel, and other territories, were annexed to Prussia; and a formal statement was inserted, declaring that Napoleon III., to whom Austria had ceded Venetia, had acquired it in order to hand over the city and Terra Firma, as far as the Isonzo, to Victor Emmanuel, when the peace should be re-established. Prussia thus became the acknowledged head of Germany, at least as far as the Main; and the national longing for complete unity was about to be gratified in a much shorter time than seemed probable in 1866.