Parliament was prorogued by Commission on the 29th of July, and it left the country satisfied with its relations to Foreign Powers and in a state of expectancy as to domestic reforms. The Eastern Question was virtually in abeyance in 1864, the ruler of the Danubian principalities having formed a government on the basis of a revolution organised on a Napoleonic model. The Ionian Islands were formally ceded by England to Greece. Russia was stamping out the last embers of the Polish insurrection, and she had still further ingratiated herself with the Polish peasants by the Imperial Ukase of the 6th of March, which released them from the oppressive rights of their landlords. Circassia was annexed, and the tide of Russian expansion was beginning to set in the direction of Central Asia. France and Italy by a convention signed at Paris, had come to an agreement, first, that French troops should quit Rome, and that Italy should pledge herself to respect the territory of the Holy See. At the same time Italy resolved to transfer her capital from Turin to Florence, the reason being that Florence was less exposed to an attack from France or Austria. The French Emperor had the good fortune in the course of the year to see his _protégé_, the Archduke Maximilian crowned in the Mexican capital, and the Latin Empire of the West recognised by the chief European Powers. The Government of the United States withheld its recognition, but the House of Representatives at Washington on the 5th of April passed a resolution declaring that the people of the United States would never recognise a Monarchy under the protection of a European Power, which had been established in the Western Hemisphere on the ruins of an American Republic.