Page:Leibniz as a Politician.djvu/27

 found in his later writings, more especially in the half-ironical The Great King's Main Design of 1687 or 8, when, on the eve of the most shameless of all Louis XIV s wars of aggression—the Orleans War—he asks why, if so jealous of the Austrian successes against the Turks, the King of France did not take part in the attack upon their dominions, more especially upon Egypt, since all of these lay at his mercy.

The two versions of Leibniz's Egyptian plan were not, however, destined to remain buried among his papers at Hanover, though both of them reposed there unnoticed for something like a century and a quarter. I cannot pass on without reminding you of the circumstances in which the Design first became known to the world, and thus gained a notoriety which in the Europe of the Napoleonic Age was inconceivable except in some sort of connexion with Napoleon himself. Before, in 1798, Napoleon set forth on that Egyptian expedition which—was primarily intended as a blow against Great Britain with what ulterior conceptions or visions I will not here pause to enquire; but in India, too, England owed France a revanche—he could not have known anything of Leibniz s design. But the British Government (through the vigilance of the Hanoverian Regency, which may probably be traced back to the historian Johannes von Müller's knowledge of the existence of the document) had received a copy of the larger memorial from Hanover. In this country we have always liked to 'focus' our ideas about foreign policy as definitely as possible; and it was not till 1803, shortly before the renewal of hostilities between England and France, that the British Ministry thought it worth while to publish in pamphlet form a very effective summary of Leibniz s memoir. Clearly, the purpose of this publication was not so much to open the eyes of Britons to vast schemes of visionary conquest which in imitation of those suggested to Louis XIV by Leibniz the First Consul might have formed, as to revive certain very distinct references in the famous