All attempts to induce Pippin to throw over his new protege failed, and from this time onward the nominal dependence of Rome and the papacy on emperors at Constantinople ceased.
His settlement of the railway dispute in 1906 was universally applauded; and the bills he introduced and passed for reorganizing the port of London, dealing with Merchant Shipping, and enforcing the working in England of patents granted there, and so increasing the employment of British labour, were greeted with satisfaction by the tariff-reformers, who congratulated themselves that a Radical free-trader should thus throw over the policy of laisser faire.
The negotiations broke downon the refusal of Italy to throw over her ally, and Napoleons proposal of a European congress, to reconsider the whole settlement under the treaties of 1815, proved equally abortive.
Notwithstanding the elaborate disguise which fear of the powers that were led Descartes to throw over his real opinions, it is impossible to read the Principes de la philosophie without acquiring the conviction that this great philosopher held that the physical world and all things in it, whether living or not living, have originated by a process of evolution, due to the continuous operation of purely physical causes, out of a primitive relatively formless matter.'
Partly from fear of a national Polish rising which Napoleon held in reserve as a last means of coercion, and partly from a subtle resolve to use the French alliance as a means of securing rich domains at the expense of Turkey, Prussia, Sweden and England, Alexander decided to throw over his allies, Prussia and England, and to seize the spoils to which the conqueror pointed as the natural sequel of a Franco-Russian alliance.
