Page:Leibniz as a Politician.djvu/26

 great European war would be insensate on the part of a power which would thus raise resistance against itself on all sides. Contrariwise, what could stand in the way of the two great imperial Houses if they were agreed on dividing the world between them France taking the Eastern half of the whole?

If this part of the argument may not seem wholly free from objections, it must be allowed that the portion of the treatise which deals with the way in which the project could be easily carried out, with the forces that would be necessary for the purpose, with the methods of providing for them and for the occupation of the country, and with the existing condition of the Turkish empire as encouraging the enterprise—is to all appearance unanswerable, and full not only of sound practical sense but of a knowledge of detail which might have commended itself to the best informed of the King s advisers. Departmental knowledge on the part of these advisers was not the least among the causes of the greatness of Louis and his monarchy; and a very strong point in Leibniz as a politician was that he never spoke without his book. Even the facilities for retreat, should the expedition unexpectedly prove unsuccessful, are carefully outlined; and, in short, the whole project is so satisfactorily expounded that the author is war ranted in dealing quite succinctly with the question of the justice of the enterprise he proposes—a holy war, conducing to the benefit of humanity, and to the advance of the Christian faith, the liberation of sufferers, and offering an opportunity of revenge for the wrongs inflicted upon France.

The memorandum never reached Louis XIV; for he never asked to see it. In June 1673, his government arrived at an understanding with the Porte, and his interest contingent as it was—in the design came to an end. But it was not forgotten by Leibniz, though he now speedily passed from France into England, and there seemed absorbed in the differential calculus and Newton. Several allusion to its central thought are to be