e country, might well cause apprehension even to the
strongest Minister.

From the time of Bismarck's departure from Frankfort our knowledge of
his official despatches ceases; we lose the invaluable assistance of his
letters to Manteuffel and Gerlach. For some time he stood so much alone
that there was no one to whom he could write unreservedly on political
matters.

He watched with great anxiety the progress of affairs with regard to
Italy. At the beginning of May he wrote a long letter to Schleinitz, as
he had done to Manteuffel, urging him to bold action; he recounted his
experiences at the Diet, he reiterated his conviction that no good would
come to Prussia from the federal tie--the sooner it was broken the
better; nothing was so much to be desired as that the Diet should
overstep its powers, and pass some resolution which Prussia could not
accept, so that Prussia could take up the glove and force a breach. The
opportunity was favourable for a revision of the Constitution. "I see,"
he wrote "in our Federal connection only a weakness of Prussia which
sooner or later must be cured, _ferro et igni_." Probably Schleinitz's
answer was not of such a kind as to tempt him to write again. In his
private letters he harps on the same string; he spent June in a visit to
Moscow but he hurried back at the end of the month to St. Petersburg to
receive news of the war. Before news had come of the peace of
Villafranca he was constantly in dread that Prussia would go to war on
behalf of Austria:

"We have prepared too soon and too thoroughly, the weight of
the burden we have taken on ourselves is drawing us down the
incline. We shall not be even an Austrian reserve; we shall
simply sacrifice ourselves for Austria and take away the war from
her."

How disturbed he was, we can see by the tone of religious resignation
which he assumes--no doubt a sign that he fears his advice has not yet
been acted upon.

"As God will. Everything here is only a question of time; peoples
and men, wisdom and folly, war and peace, they come and go like
rain and water, and the sea alone remains. There is nothing on
earth but hypocrisy and deceit."

The language of this and other letters was partly due to the state of
his health; the continual anxiety and work of his life at Frankfort,
joined to irregular hours and careless habits, had told upon his
constitution. He fell seriously ill in St. Petersburg with a gastric and
rheumatic