However, the liberalism of his early years was gone forever, and he had become reconciled to Metternich's view that in an age of decay, the sole function of a statesman was to prop up mouldering institutions. It was the hand of the author of that offensive "Memorandum" to Frederick William III on the freedom of the press that drafted the Carlsbad Decrees. It was he who inspired the policy of repressing the freedom of the universities, and he noted in his diary as a day more important than that of Leipzig the session of the Vienna conference of 1819, which decided to make the convocation of representative assemblies in the German states impossible, by enforcing the letter of Article XIII of the Act of Confederation.