Page:Leibniz as a Politician.djvu/34

 belonging to this period he denounces the sacrifice of the Habsburg claims to the entire Spanish Monarchy by the Partition Treaties as poltroonery; and his activity in the critical months ending with the acceptance by France of the last will of Charles II was extreme: these writings fill a volume and a half of Foucher de Careil, where they are arranged in wild chronological disorder. And here should once more be noted his literary inventiveness of mise-en-scene. A Venetian sets his fellow Signori right on the subject of their interests in the struggle; a Dutchman of Amsterdam retorts on a sophistical publication purporting to come from Antwerp 'but fabricated in a French shop;' Cardinal Portocarrero and the Admiral of Castile confer in a dialogue serving as a prelude to a manifesto drawn up by Leibniz for the use of Archduke Charles, when in 1703 he was preparing for a roundabout journey into Spain. Leibniz was concealed beneath all these disguises; nor was there an important phase in the war which he fails to accompany by his comments. It is quite true that what may be called the Hanoverian interest is not lost sight of, the conferring of a great command upon the Elector George Lewis being repeatedly urged; but except in one pamphlet (1703) where it is stated, probably with perfect correctness, that this demand would certainly have been granted had William III lived long enough, it is only incidentally made. What was the dominant thought of all to the mind of Leibniz as a politician in these years may be gathered, even more from his writings on the war, from his writings concerning the Peace which ended it. The most important of these, the well-known La Paix d Utrecht inexcusable (1713) was written not only with the object of exposing the conduct of the Maritime Powers—which in the case of England was so cynical as hardly to need exposure, for though the Peace of Utrecht can be defended, the methods by which it was concluded cannot. It was also designed to justify the Emperor for holding out alone; and, even during the negotiations afterwards carried on at Rastadt, Leibniz