There is no prospect that the dissension will be ended by mutual concessions. This might be done, if mutual confidence existed between the contending parties; but of such confidence there is a total lack. So great is the estrangement that the original occasion of it is lost sight of. Neither party cares so much about securing the success of its favorite measures as about defeating the measures of its opponent. Either the possibility of such a relation of the king to the Parliament was not entertained when the constitution was drawn up, or it is a great deficiency that no provision was made for it; or (as we should prefer to say) the difficulty may have been foreseen and yet no provision have been made for it, simply because none could have been made consistently with Frederick William IV.'s maxim, 'A free people under a free king'--a maxim which sounds well, but which, when the people are bent on going in one way and the king in another, is difficult to reconcile with the requirement of the constitution that both must go in the same way. In a republic, where the legislature and chief magistrate are both chosen representatives of one people, no protracted disagreement between them is possible. In a monarchy where a ministry, which has lost the confidence of the legislature, resigns its place to another, the danger is hardly greater. But in a monarchy whose constitution provides that king and people shall rule jointly, yet both act freely and independently, nothing but the most paradisiacal state of humanity could secure mutual satisfaction and continued harmony. Prussia is now demonstrating to the world that, if the people of a nation are to have in the national legislation anything more than an advisory power, they must have a determining power. To say that the king shall have the unrestricted right of declaring and making war, and at the same time that no money can be used without the free consent of Parliament, is almost fit to be called an Irish bull. Such mutual freedom is impossible except when king and Parliament perfectly agree in reference to the war itself. But, if this agreement exists, there is either no need of a Parliament or no need of a king. It makes little difference how the constitution is worded in this particular, nor even what was intended by the author of this provision. What is in itself an intrinsic contradiction cannot be carried out in practice. Whether any formal change is made in the constitution or not, a different mode of interpreting it, a different conception of the relation of monarch to subject, must become current, if the constitution is to be a working instrument. Prussia must become again practically an absolute monarchy or a constitutional monarchy like England. Nor is there much doubt which of these possibilities will be realized. And not the least among the causes which will hasten the final triumph of Liberalism there, is the exhibition of the strength of republicanism here, while undergoing its