On the 17th of March, 1854, the Queen, nettled by the rough practical “North German sense” in this letter from the King of Prussia, endeavoured to answer it--her draft being submitted to Lord Clarendon and Lord Aberdeen for approval. Her answer, according to Sir Theodore Martin, indicates a “firm hand” and “admirable tact.”[163] To the political student of the present day it indicates neither the one nor the other. There was no tact in scoffing at the King’s “North German sound practical sense” by saying, “Had such language fallen from the King of Hanover or of Saxony, I would have understood it,” and there was more weakness and sentimentality than firmness and statecraft in the hand that added, “But up to the present hour I have regarded Prussia as one of the five great Powers which, since the Peace of 1815, have been the guarantors of treaties, the guardians of civilisation, the champions of right, and ultimate arbitrators of the nations; and I have for my part felt the holy duty to which they were thus divinely called, being at the same time perfectly alive to the obligations, serious as they are, and fraught with danger, which it imposes. Renounce these obligations, my dear brother, and in doing so you renounce for Prussia the status she has hitherto held.”[164] If the example thus set by Prussia--that of making the interests of the Prussian people the supreme object of her policy--should find imitators, the Queen contended, “European civilisation is abandoned as a plaything to the winds; right will no longer find a champion, nor the oppressed an umpire to appeal to.”