affairs". Sturdza was noted for refusing to congratulate Cuza on his birthday, as well as for rejecting any suggestion that the Commission owed its mandate to the Domnitor. The Commission proceedings also witnessed Sturdza's advocacy for calling in a "foreign prince" to rule over the Principalities. He veered to the right more than other members: in his legal reading, Cuza was only legitimate "for as long as Europe will not send us a foreign prince"—a phrasing which appeared, almost identical, in the constitutional project submitted for approval by the commission. Their claim was ridiculed by Cuza's leading Moldavian partisan, Kogălniceanu, who read in it traces of Sturdza's spite (paraphrased as: "I couldn't be a reigning prince; well then, neither will you"). In September 1859, however, he agreed with Cuza that the Commission needed to work on solving "the question between landowners and villagers"—by which Cuza actually meant a major land reform. "Monstrous coalition" Unlike other Moldavian delegates on the commission, Sturdza fully supported establishing the national capital in Bucharest; as he put it, Iași lacked was both insufficiently bourgeois and insufficiently Romanian. He then stood in the Romanian Assembly of Deputies, representing the right-wing opposition to Cuza's egalitarian policies. As noted by Xenopol, he was the "most progressive" right-winger, endorsing public schooling, mass recruitment, and the land value tax, as well as an increased salary for the Moldavian Prime Minister, who was by then his nominal rival Kogălniceanu. In January 1861, he objected as other conservatives passed a motion of no confidence against Kogălniceanu's administration, arguing that the accusations of corruption brought up against the head of government were unfounded. Sturdza's flirtation with liberalism ended when it came to land reform—as the "landowners' main champion", from May 1862 he was an outspoken opponent of attempts to dispossess boyars and the gentry at the benefit of peasants. He upheld a rival project provided for common land in rural communities, with family allotments of, at most, 15 square kilometers. Attempting to solve peasant destitution by other means, he set up his own lands in Iași County to function as model farms, introducing fallow techniques that more than doubled the expected output. He continued to live as an aristocrat—in 1861, he dueled with, and killed, Costin Vârnav over a dance-floor scuffle. As early as 1861, Sturdza had declared his astonishment that Cuza never selected Wallachia and Moldavia's still-separate cabinets from the respective majorities,