The popular Prussian view about England found expression in the comic paper _Kladderdatsch_:-- Deutschland beziehe billige Sympathien Und Frankreich theures Kriegsmateriel.
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 _protege_, 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.