pleas urging him to stay the growth of the Protestant
Power of North Germany. On June 10, at the outbreak of the war, he
secretly concluded a treaty with Austria, holding out to her the
prospect of recovering the great province of Silesia (torn from her by
Frederick the Great in 1740) in return for a magnanimous cession of
Venetia to Italy. The news of Koeniggraetz led to a violent outburst of
anti-Prussian feeling; but Napoleon refused to take action at once, when
it might have been very effective.

The best plan for the French Government would have been to send to the
Rhine all the seasoned troops left available by Napoleon III.'s
ill-starred Mexican enterprise, so as to help the hard-pressed South
German forces, offering also the armed mediation of France to the
combatants. In that case Prussia must have drawn back, and Napoleon III.
could have dictated his own terms to Central Europe. But his earlier
leanings towards Prussia and Italy, the advice of Prince Napoleon
("Plon-Plon") and Lavalette, and the wheedlings of the Prussian
ambassador as to compensations which France might gain as a set-off to
Prussia's aggrandisement, told on the French Emperor's nature, always
somewhat sluggish and then prostrated by severe internal pain; with the
result that he sent his proposals for a settlement of the points in
dispute, but took no steps towards enforcing them. A fortnight thus
slipped away, during which the Prussians reaped the full fruits of their
triumph at Koeniggraetz; and it was not until July 29, three days after
the Preliminaries of Peace were signed, that the French Foreign
Minister, Drouyn de Lhuys, worried his master, then prostrate with pain
at Vichy, into sanctioning the following demands from victorious
Prussia: the cession to France of the Rhenish Palatinate (belonging to
Bavaria), the south-western part of Hesse Darmstadt, and that part of
Prussia's Rhine-Province lying in the valley of the Saar which she had
acquired after Waterloo. This would have brought within the French
frontier the great fortress of Mainz (Mayence); but the great mass of
these gains, it will be observed, would have been at the expense of
South German States, whose cause France proclaimed her earnest desire to
uphold against the encroaching power of Prussia.

Bismarck took care to have an official copy of these demands in writing,
the use of which will shortly appear; and having procured this precious
document, he defied the French en