those between employer and employed. But, though Leibniz was a courtier and very well understood the necessity for a deferential attitude and the nuances of expression in writing as well as in speaking which that attitude implies, no great publicist, from Burke to Gentz to the leaders of modern journalism in the days of Louis-Philippe and Queen Victoria, has ever been more desirous of placing himself in touch with a popular, and, if possible, a numerous audience. Accordingly, the political writings of Leibniz are sometimes confidential memoranda, addressed to sovereigns and ministers, sometimes pamphlets in the latter case almost always anonymous or pseudonymous, launched upon the sea of unbounded publicity. In yet other instances, they are something between the two species, resembling those ballons d'essai of which later examples have been started in the sphere of higher journalism—sometimes suggesting to those in authority ideas to the conception of which they may not have chanced or not have ventured to rise, sometimes, again, inspired by those in authority with a view to ascertain how far public opinion will follow. This relation between authority and public opinion was not so well organised at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century as it may have been in our days; but statesmen have never been able to operate quite without the support of public opinion—and public opinion, in its turn, usually needs a little assistance in the process of forming itself. Leibniz himself compares one of his more popular tracts a scheme for a descent on Biscay after the battle of La Hogue—to one of the letters which at Venice members of the pensive public were invited to place in the lion s mouth in the palace of St. Mark, to be used or ignored in the counsels of the Signoria.
It would serve no purpose in this brief address to seek to discriminate between the varieties among his contributions to political literature, of which I can only mention a few specimens. For my primary object is
