To his daughter he sent a long and flattering reply beginning: "It is remarkably clear and complete, and does you the greatest credit. I agree with every word of it, and feel sure it must convince everyone who is open to conviction from sound logic, and prepared to follow what sound logic dictates." This pathetic faith in the potency of logic in political affairs is hard to reconcile with the Prince Consort's earlier and sounder dictum that feelings, not arguments, constitute the basis for actions. It is evident from the rest of the letter that the Princess had laid it down that the responsibility of his advisers does not in fact impair the monarch's dignity and importance, but is really for him the best of safeguards. She had gone on to discuss the proposition that the patriarchal relation in which the monarchs of old were supposed to stand towards their people was preferable to the constitutional system which interposes the Minister between the sovereign and his subjects. Her father's comments on this would have seemed to many Prussians most heretical doctrine to be imparted to their future Queen. The patriarchal relation, he says, is pretty much like the idyllic life of the Arcadian shepherds--a figure of speech, and not much more. It was the fashionable phrase of an historical transition-period. Monarchy in the days of Attila, of Charlemagne, of the Hohenstaufen, of the Austrian Emperors, of Louis XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, &c., was as little like a patriarchal relation as anything could be. On the contrary it was sovereignty based upon spoliation, war, murder, oppression, and massacre. That relation was sedulously developed in the small German States, whose rulers were little more than great landed proprietors, during a short period in the eighteenth century, and was cherished out of a sentimental feeling. It then gave way before the Voltairean philosophy during the reigns of Frederick II, Joseph II, Louis XVI, &c., was turned topsy-turvy by the French Revolution, and finally extinguished in the military despotism of Napoleon.