n on the line
of Wuerzburg, Erfurt, Leipsic; then, despatching the former through
Havelberg toward Stettin, to hurry the latter on its heels, relieve
Dantzic, and seize the lower Vistula.

This would have been a plan worthy of Napoleon's genius but for one
fact. "In war," he had written four years earlier, "the moral element
and public opinion are half the battle." If he had understood these
factors in 1813, and if a sound judgment had developed his ideas, the
projected campaign would have become famous for the boldness of its
conception and for its careful estimate of natural advantages. But
human nature as the conquering Napoleon had known it--at least
Prussian human nature--had changed, and of this change the defeated
Napoleon took no account. He was no longer fighting absolute monarchs
with hireling armies, but uprisen nations which were themselves armies
instinct with capacity and energy. On March twenty-first Eugene began
to carry out his stepfather's directions. But for the new feeling in
Prussia they might have been fully executed. The vassal princes of the
Rhine Confederacy had received the imperial behests concerning new
levies. The Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, aware of the German national
movement and furthest removed from French influence, refused to obey.
King Jerome of Westphalia pleaded poverty, and procrastinated until he
dared do so no longer. Bavaria dreamed for an instant of asserting her
neutrality, but the menace of French armaments wrung an unwilling
compliance from her. Wuertemberg and Frankfurt were too near France to
hesitate at all. Saxony was in a position far different from that of
any other state in the confederation, the predicament of Frederick
Augustus, her king, being peculiar and exceptional. After his
interview with Napoleon on the latter's flight through Dresden he felt
how precarious was the future. Warsaw, the gem of his crown, was gone,
and the Prussian people were in revolt against the Emperor of the
French; he turned perforce toward Austria. But Austria also was
uneasy; the people were again hostile to Napoleon, and Francis, in an
agony of uncertainty, could only temporize. With Saxony in this
attitude, Metternich gave full course to his ingenuity.

For a year past that minister had been playing a double game. Seeking
through his envoy at Stockholm to embroil Bernadotte with the Czar, he
told Hardenberg almost simultaneously that it was all up with Russia,
that England was wor