The traditions of the United States, of course, forbade their
intervention in the Franco-Prussian dispute. By an article of their
political creed termed the Monroe Doctrine, they asserted their resolve
not to interfere in European affairs and to prevent the interference of
any strictly European State in those of the New World. It was on this
rather vague doctrine that they cried "hands off" from Mexico to the
French Emperor; and the abandonment of his _protégé_, the so-called
Emperor Maximilian, by French troops, brought about the death of that
unhappy prince and a sensible decline in the prestige of his patron
(June 1867).

Russia likewise remembered Napoleon III.'s championship of the Poles in
1863, which, however Platonic in its nature, caused the Czar some
embarrassment. Moreover, King William of Prussia had soothed the Czar's
feelings, ruffled by the dethroning of three German dynasties in 1866,
by a skilful reply which alluded to his (King William's) desire to be of
service to Russian interests elsewhere--a hint which the diplomatists of
St. Petersburg remembered in 1870 to some effect.

For the rest, the Czar Alexander II. (1855-81) and his Ministers were
still absorbed in the internal policy of reform, which in the sixties
freed the serfs and gave Russia new judicial and local institutions,
doomed to be swept away in the reaction following the murder of that
enlightened ruler. The Russian Government therefore pledged itself to
neutrality, but in a sense favourable to Prussia. The Czar ascribed the
Crimean War to the ambition of Napoleon III., and remembered the
friendship of Prussia at that time, as also in the Polish Revolt of
1863[11]. Bismarck's policy now brought its reward.

[11] See Sir H. Rumbold's _Recollections of a Diplomatist_ (First