Yet, though Prussia had concluded military agreements with the states of southern Germany and held them also by means of the Zollverein, this was far from bringing about a peaceful realization of unity. The southern states, not merely the sovereigns only, but the peoples, have always had little taste for Prussian leadership, and after 1866 this feeling was very visible. For this reason Bismarck felt it important to instigate a war against France. Union against the foreigner was to complete political unity. This subject has been dealt with in the preceding chapter, and we need here merely to repeat that warlike sentiments were in the air in 1867, in regard to the desire of Napoleon III to add to his empire the little duchy of Luxembourg and Bismarck’s opposition to this desire. France was not then in a favorable condition for war, and the matter was finally settled by declaring Luxembourg a neutral state and ordering the walls around its capital to be destroyed. CAUSES OF HOSTILE RELATIONS In spite of this settlement, it remained certain to everybody that a conflict would break out in a short time between France and Prussia. We have seen what reasons Bismarck had for such a war. Napoleon III’s government, justly censured by opinion for the weakness which it had shown in 1866, was eager to retrieve the fault it had then committed. Yet the weakness of the administration continued and prevented it from adopting the indispensable military measures that it should have done. The enemies of power were declaiming against standing armies, which they declared useless. The government deputies were afraid to dissatisfy their constituents by aggravating the burdens of the service. Marshal Niel, minister of war, tried indeed to adopt measures with a view to the seemingly inevitable conflict. He caused to be elaborated a plan of campaign, a system of transportation by railway, an arrangement for the chief places of the east to be armed with rifled cannon. But the Chamber grudged him the appropriations for the increase of the army, asking him if “he wished to make France a vast barracks.” “Take care,” he answered the opposition, “lest you make it a vast cemetery.” Accordingly, when the mobile national guard had been created, made up of all the young men who had not been drawn by lot, organization was given to it only on paper, and it was never drilled. Leboeuf, who succeeded Niel in August, 1869, abandoned, moreover, most of his predecessor’s plans. He even neglected to do anything towards carrying out on the eastern frontier any of the works of defense already recommended as urgent by the generals of the restoration.