and there at last giving way to better things. 'Germany,' so Leibniz wrote many years after John Philip s death, was scarcely beginning to breathe again, and peopled almost entirely by a generation under age if war broke out afresh, there was reason to fear that this generation would be destroyed before it had reached maturity, and that a great part of the unhappy land would be all but turned into a desert." These were the impressions under which a policy of peace seemed indispensable to the patriotic Elector of Mainz, who, as Leibniz says, could not conceive that the predominance of France would assert itself with the extraordinary rapidity which its progress was actually to display; these were the conditions with which, as well as with the stagnant sluggishness prevailing in many parts of the Empire and with the mistrust of the House of Austria which war and peace had alike bequeathed to many of its Princes and their subjects, those politicians and political thinkers had to contend who, like Leibniz, gradually came to recognise that the Western was not less imminent than the Eastern peril.
Leibniz' earliest political tract[1] was written for the use of Boineburg, when, after his restoration to the Elector s favour, that statesman in 1668 attended the Polish election diet as ambassador for the German candidate (Count Palatine Philip William of Neuburg). Neither he nor either of the candidates really favoured by France and Austria respectively was chosen; and thus, after a fashion, the desired balance may be said to have been observed. What interests us in the tract is Leibniz deprecation of yet another possibility (which likewise remained unrealised), viz., the choice of the Russian candidate. Russia, writes the far-sighted young politician, who in his later years was to be greatly attracted by the civilising policy and the high personal intelligence of Peter the Great, would by the virtual appropriation of Poland
- ↑ It seems to have been preceded by an original memoire De foedere Rhenano in the same year, dealing with the alliance mentioned in the text about to be concluded by Mainz, with Trier and Lorraine.
