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.