that sovran
brought both upon France and upon her enemies. His Annales politiques
are a useful correction to the Siecle de Louis Quatorze. It was in the
course of the great struggle of the Spanish Succession that he
turned his attention to war and came to the conclusion that it is an
unnecessary evil and even an absurdity. In 1712 he attended the congress
at Utrecht in the capacity of secretary to Cardinal de Polignac, one
of the French delegates. His experiences there confirmed his optimistic
mind in the persuasion that perpetual peace was an aim which might
readily be realised; and in the following year he published the memoir
which he had been preparing, in two volumes, to which he added a third
four years later.

Though he appears not to have known the work of Cruce he did not claim
originality. He sheltered his proposal under an august name, entitling
it Project of Henry the Great to render Peace Perpetual, explained
by the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. The reference is to the "great design"
ascribed to Henry IV. by Sully, and aimed at the abasement of the power
of Austria: a federation of the Christian States of Europe arranged
in groups and under a sovran Diet, which would regulate international
affairs and arbitrate in all quarrels. [Footnote: It is described
in Sully's Memoires, Book XXX.] Saint-Pierre, ignoring the fact that
Sully's object was to eliminate a rival power, made it the text for
his own scheme of a perpetual alliance of all the sovrans of Europe
to guarantee to one another the preservation of their states and to
renounce war as a means of settling their differences. He drew up the
terms of such an alliance, and taking the European powers one by
one demonstrated that it was the plain interest of each to sign the
articles. Once the articles were signed the golden age would begin.
[Footnote: For Sully's grand Design compare the interesting article of
Sir Geoffrey Butler in the Edinburgh Review, October 1919.]

It is not to our present purpose to comment on this plan which the
author with his characteristic simplicity seriously pressed upon the
attention of statesmen. It is easy to criticise it in the light of
subsequent history, and to see that, if the impossible had happened and
the experiment had been tried and succeeded, it might have caused more
suffering than all the wars from that day to this. For it was based on a
perpetuation of the political status quo in Europe. It assumed that the
existing poli