stuck to his guns professing to tender to the Emperor—for his own ears only—advice which nothing but conviction and trust in the future could have induced him to offer when the eleventh hour had all but passed. In such a mood Leibniz was perhaps unlikely to respond with much fervour to the Project of a Perpetual Peace, forwarded to him by that amiable fellow-philosopher, the Abbé Bernardin de St. Pierre which (if I may be pardoned so personal a reference) I remember discussing in a lecture delivered at the opening of the new Owens College a good many years ago. Even amiable philosophers, when they touch the border of politics, are apt to say dangerous things, and Leibniz in 1715 was not prepared to listen to the suggestion that a suitable step towards the establishment of Eternal Peace would be the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. His own dream was an Alliance of Nations; but the Empire, strengthened as he desired to see it, seemed to him the natural nucleus of such an alliance, rather than an obstacle in the path towards it.
In the meantime, at least one of the political ends for which he had laboured long and unintermittently, though at first with very doubtful prospects of success and at last with small thanks from those who had benefited by his efforts, had been accomplished; the English succession was settled, and though his honoured mistress and correspondent, the Electress Sophia, had gone to her rest, the House of Hanover had been established upon the English Throne. I should not attempt on this occasion, even were time left to me, to summarise the history of what was done and what with still greater wisdom was left undone by the House of Hanover to bring about this consummation; but I should like before I close to say a very few words as to Leibniz s share in these transactions, though even of this I can only refer to some aspects. In January 1700—when there was as yet no apprehension of the death of William III or of the impossibility of averting the outbreak of a European War—Leibniz and the active English ambassador,
