wildfire; excitement and indignation reached their highest pitch, and the uprising against Napoleon became national in the widest sense. It was long before the officials of Prussia realized the vital importance of the popular feeling thus aroused. For some weeks after ratifying the treaty which Napoleon substituted for that of Schönbrunn the Berlin cabinet simply fretted in impotence. The young officers of the war party were sharpening their swords on the steps of the French embassy and demanding the disgrace of Haugwitz; there was even insubordination, and the King, with tears streaming from his eyes, threatened to abdicate. His cup of bitterness was more than full. When the Confederation of the Rhine was formed, he besought the Czar to guarantee the integrity of Turkey, hoping that this apple of discord between Russia and France being removed, Prussia would be secure. But Alexander, trusting to gain French neutrality and carry out his schemes of Oriental aggrandizement by slight concessions in the Oubril negotiations as to Naples, Sardinia, and Hanover, refused, vaguely promising to do all in his power to protect the integrity of Prussia, provided Prussia would not attack Russia should he go to war with France about Turkey. The privy councilors of Frederick William, blind to the national feeling which would gladly support a war against Napoleon's tyranny, proposed thereupon to form what French diplomacy skilfully suggested, a League of the North. The King and his advisers at first thought such a federation would be an offset to the menace of their dangerous neighbor on the West. Although kept in ignorance of the Russian and English negotiations at Paris, they heard in August that Hanover had been offered to Great Britain, and felt that the French occupation of southern Germany was intolerable. Accordingly the King opened negotiations with Napoleon for the formation of a North German Confederation to include Saxony, the two Mecklenburgs, Oldenburg, Hesse-Cassel, the Hanseatic towns, and a number of minor principalities. The Emperor could not well give a categorical refusal, and consented on condition that Prussia should disarm. In this interval Alexander contemptuously rejected the extraordinary conditions granted by Oubril in a paper which not only abandoned the Naples Bourbons, the house of Savoy, and the Hanoverian question, but also guaranteed the integrity of the Ottoman Empire! This attitude of the Czar made the disarmament of Prussia essential to Napoleon's supremacy in Germany, the more so because, by the demise of the German-Roman Empire, Russia had lost her right of intervention in Germany, and would probably seek a new pretext to recover it.