Page:Leibniz as a Politician.djvu/37

 the glory of a prince lies, not in attaching himself to his ease and his pleasures, but in the consciousness that he is great only for the purpose of securing the welfare of all. These are noble words, and worthy, not of a servant of princes or princelings, but of one who fitly aspired to be the adviser of the ruler of a great and free nation.

This, however, was not to be; and perhaps we may think it well that Leibniz was not destined to be lumped by English prejudice—a prejudice, let us allow, not without a certain amount of provocation—with the rest of the German counsellors and favourites of our first Hanoverian King. As a matter of fact, the height of his activity belongs to the earlier rather than the later stages of the Succession question—to the period intervening between the death of the Duke of Gloucester (July 1700) and the Act of Settlement which named the Electress Sophia and her descendants as successors after the childless Queen Anne (August 1701), and the conclusion (in the following month) of the Grand Alliance at the Hague. These two events were never dissociated from one another in the minds of Leibniz, and, in another set of Considerations on the matter of the English Succession, he showed that they had both been present to the mind of William III, when he delivered his speech from the throne (February 1701), of which the Act of Settlement had been the direct result. The War of the Spanish Succession was in the eyes of both William and Leibniz the War of the English Succession also; and in the Peace of Utrecht, which settled the Spanish question, he was actually desirous of inserting specific conditions that would in his opinion have placed the settlement of the English beyond the reach of doubt.

But this was later. Even when he was at what I have described as the height of his political influence, he held no official political position at Hanover, and was in no sense minister of the Electress Dowager, though the reports of her special agent in London, Falaiseau, passed through his hands. With Bothmer, who in the early