“The Bavarian Foreign Minister,” he said, blushed; “the Minister of Würtemberg was confused; the Minister of Baden did not deny it, and the Minister of Hesse avowed everything.” Further, M. de X― asserted that, when it was no longer necessary to keep France in good humour, Prussia would enforce the clauses which gave her supreme command, and would bring the Southern armies into harmony with her own organization. Apparently, this authentic information did not obtain a ready belief in the autumn of 1866; but it alarmed and disturbed the French Court, and the public confirmation of the unwelcome report, less than a year afterwards, visible to all men in the actual re-organization of the Southern armies, together with the failure to purchase Luxemburg, still further increased the suspicion, deepened the alarm, and aroused the indignation of the Emperor at the slights inflicted on France, who, as the “predominant” Continental power and the “vanguard of civilization,” always considered that she ought to have her own way. _The Emperor seeks Allies._ In the beginning of 1868 the principal parties were engaged in preparing for a conflict which each considered to be inevitable; and the other Powers, great and small, more or less concerned, were agitated by hopes and fears. Russia desired to recover her freedom of movement in the East, and especially to throw off what Prince Gortchakoff called his “robe de Nessus,” the clause in the treaty of Paris which declared the Euxine to be a neutral sea. Austria aimed at the restoration of her authority in Germany, and was not yet convinced that her path lay eastward. Italy had many longings, but her pressing necessity was to seat herself in the capital of the Cæsars and the Popes, once again occupied by the French, who had re-entered the Papal States to expel the Garibaldians. It was in the skirmish at Mentana that the new breech-loading rifle, the Chassepot, “wrought miracles,” according to General de Failly, and established its superiority over the “needle gun.” Holland, Belgium, and even Switzerland were troubled by the uncertain prospect which the Imperial theory of “large agglomerations” had laid bare; Spain was in the throes of a revolutionary convulsion; and England—she had just mended her constitution, and had begun to look on Continental politics with relative indifference, except in so far as they affected the fortunes of “parties,” and might be used strategically as a means of gaining or holding fast the possession of power. Yet so strained were the relations of France and Prussia that General von Moltke actually framed, in the spring of 1868, the plan of campaign which he literally carried out in 1870—a fact implying that even then he considered that his Government was sufficiently prepared to encounter the new and imperfectly developed scheme of army organization and armament originally devised by the Emperor and Marshal Niel, and modified