Government was nearly as odious to most Conservatives as to the Liberals. They said, the king should have put himself at the head of the national, the German demand for the permanent relief of their fellow Germans in Schleswig-Holstein; he should have taken the cause out of the sphere of party politics; thus he might have regained his popularity and united his people. This is quite possible; but it is certain that he did not take this course. He seemed to regard the movement in favor of Prince Frederick's claims to the duchy as a democratic movement. It was so called by the more violent Conservatives. The king, after failing to take the lead, could not now, consistently with his determination to be independent, fall in with the crowd; this would seem like yielding to pressure. Besides, he felt probably more than the Prussian people in general the binding force of the London treaty. Yet, as a German, he could not be content to ignore the claims of the German inhabitants of the duchy; there was, therefore, no course left but to make hostile demonstrations against Denmark. The pretext was not an unfair one. The November constitution, by which Denmark, immediately after the accession of the protocol prince, the present king, Christian IX., proposed to incorporate Schleswig, was a violation of treaty obligations. The Danish Government was required to retract its course. It refused, and war followed. What will be the result of it, what even the Prussian Government wishes to be the result of it, is a matter of uncertainty. Suspicions of a secret treaty between it and Austria find easy credence, according to which, as is supposed, nothing but their mutual aggrandizement is aimed at. Certain it is that none even of the best informed pretend to know definitely what is designed, nor be confident that the design, whatever it is, will be executed. Yet for the time a certain degree of enthusiasm has been of course awakened in all by the successful advance of Prussian troops through Schleswig, and the indefinite hope is cherished that somehow, even in spite of the apparent policy of the Government, the war will result in rescuing the duchy entirely from the Danish grasp. Thus, temporarily at least, the popular mind is again diverted from internal politics; and perhaps the Government was moved as much by a desire to effect this diversion as by any other motive. The decided schism between Prussia and Austria on the one hand, and the smaller German States on the other, a schism in which the majority of the people even in Prussia and Austria side with the smaller states, favors the notion that these two powers dislike heartily to enter into a movement whose motive and end is mainly the promotion of German unity at the expense of monarchical principles. For, however much of subtlety may be exhibited in proving that the prince of Augustenburg is the rightful heir to the duchy, the real source of the German