Page:Leibniz as a Politician.djvu/28

 writer s statement to the importance of which the possession of Malta might prove to France. These references incidental to the days of Louis XIV, seemed to call very speedily for publication and comment in the days of Napoleon. You know that after the Peace of Amiens we found ourselves unable to evacuate Malta, and that, largely in consequence of this inability on our part, war broke out anew between England and France, before this very year 1803 had come to a close. The French immediately seized Hanover, and General Mortier, who commanded the occupying troops (which were by no means popular there) obtained a copy of the design in its shorter form, the Consilium Aegyptiacum aforesaid. Thus it found its way to the First Consul, who may or may not have been edified by its perusal, and into the library of the French Academy, where Thiers and Michaud read it and formed incorrect conclusions from it, which I have no time for discussing.

One more remark, and I will leave the subject of the celebrated Design. Nothing could be more childish than to conclude that the treatment of Leibniz in this matter by Louis XIV (which political considerations are amply sufficient to explain) provoked him to the subsequent attacks made by him upon the great monarch and arch-disturber of the Peace of Europe. I have made myself acquainted with many of these attacks—both those of which Leibniz was beyond doubt the author and those of which the indefatigable Pfleiderer (who discovered not less than twelve anonymous pamphlets of the sort bound up in a single volume), with more or less certainty, attributes to him; and in none of them can I perceive any trace of a pettiness wholly foreign to the nature of Leibniz. He had to undergo, and underwent without loss of dignity, provocations of a much severer sort from a quarter where he deserved every consideration; while from Louis XIV he had nothing to expect, and in the King's refusal to receive him could have found very little to resent.

The most notable of these polemical invectives is the