man in the Empire. Leibniz accompanied Boineburg to
Frankfurt, and there he wrote and published a paper on
Legal Education. This paper brought him to the notice
of the Archbishop, who became interested in Leibniz and
took him into his service. Leibniz writes of the Elector of
Mainz: '... he had seen the miseries of Germany, whose
ruins were still smoking: he was one of those who had
laboured most to bring back rest to the land, from which
life seemed almost to have gone. The country was (as one
might hardly say) "peopled" with little children, and if
war were to break out again (as might be expected when
Sweden was irritated and France threatening) there was
every reason to fear that this seed of a new population
would be destroyed and a great part of poor Germany left
almost without inhabitant.' These experiences had led the
Archbishop to bend all his energies to the rebuilding of
Germany and the preserving of peace. He seems to have
been well served by Leibniz in these ends. During his
years of office at the Court of the Elector, Leibniz was
busy with schemes for turning the military ambitions of
Louis XIV away from his neighbours, for the alliance of
the German states within the Empire, and for the reunit-
ing of Christendom. The reconciliation of Protestant and
Catholic was of the utmost importance for the internal
peace of the Empire. In preparing these schemes, Leibniz
showed what was to be a characteristic of his work in all
its branches, most notably in his metaphysics, a delight in
in all-embracing plan together with a most minute atten-
tion to detail.

His plan for diverting the attention of Louis XIV away
from his European neighbours began with an appeal to a
great Christian monarch to consider how much more suit-
able it would be to embark on the conquest of Egypt than
of a poor little country like Holland. It included a plan for
the actual military expedition so well thought out that

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