(Manchester,] 4 July 1866 

Dear Moor, 

The other half of the note enclosed. Unfortunately, your 
telegram reached me after 12 o'clock, so that I could not make use 
of the first post. 

What do you say to the Prussians? Their initial successes were 
exploited with enormous vigour, and, if it had not been for this 
intensity, Benedek would probably have quietly withdrawn to 
Olmütz,? but he was obviously forced to come to battle yesterday, 
and there could be no doubt about the issue after what had 
befallen. To determine the outcome of such a decisive battle in 8 
hours is quite unprecedented; in other circumstances, it would 
have lasted 2 days.*** But the needle-gun is a merciless weapon, 
and then these fellows really do fight with a verve that I have 
never before observed in such peace-time troops. For the 
defender, the attacker’s need to take positions by storm compen- 
sates for his superiority in weapons, and here too the Prussians 
appear to have accomplished a great deal. Benedek, with his deep 
‘plan’, turns out to have been not merely a jackass but a dullard as 
well. How splendidly he could, with sufficient men, have caught 
those fellows in the mountains! 

At all events, Bismarck will now try to set up his Imperial 
Germany, and that should include Bohemia, which he hopes to 
take from the Austrians and thereby establish a link between 
Silesia and Bavaria. In the treaty with Italy, he did after all 
stipulate ‘un territoire autrichien équivalent a la Vénéti’.?>** 

Berlin is again acting with the vileness for which it is famed and 
yesterday even went so far as to elect a whole load of ministers. 
What will those camels of men of Progress say now? 

The farce up in the North-West is delightful and will probably 
soon be no less so in the South, too. 

The only safeguard against the betrayal that Bismarck has 
plotted with Bonaparte is the quite unexpected magnitude of the 

a Czech name: Olomouc - > ‘Austrian territory equivalent to Venetia’