The Queen and Prince were exceedingly indignant with the King of Prussia for withholding his support and sympathy from England. He was a man of weak and excitable disposition, and very much influenced by his brother-in-law, the Czar. The King’s brother, however, then known as the Prince of Prussia (afterwards the Emperor William), and his son, Prince Frederic William (afterwards the husband of the Princess Royal), strongly sympathized with England; and this circumstance naturally strengthened the warm friendship already existing between them and the English Royal Family. How distant at this time must have seemed the realization of Prince Albert’s and Stockmar’s dream of a united Germany, and of a political alliance between England and Germany. The Prince, however, never lost sight of his goal. He wrote to his stepmother at Coburg, who was strongly Russian in her sympathies, “If there were a _Germany_ and a _German_ Sovereign in Berlin, this [the war] could never have happened.” When once war was declared (March, 1854), the Queen threw her whole heart and soul into the cause. She wished she had sons old enough to go, two with the army, two with the navy. Lord Aberdeen had sanctioned the setting apart of a Day of Humiliation and Prayer for the success of our arms by sea and land. The Queen very strongly and quite properly deprecated the use of the expression a Day of Humiliation. She condemned this as savoring of hypocrisy. She believed her policy to have been directed by unselfishness and honesty, and therefore felt the only appropriate prayer would be one expressive of our deep thankfulness for all the benefits we had enjoyed, and entreating the protection of the Almighty for our forces on sea and land. She equally objected to imprecations against our enemies, and suggested the use of a form already in the Prayer Book, “To be used before a Fight at Sea.”