Page:Leibniz as a Politician.djvu/10

was almost everywhere wanting. He was interested in the progress of industry and trade, predicting, almost a century before it became a great historical fact, the enormous value of the use of machinery in what continued, by a long-lived misnomer, to be called manufacturing industry; but he was not less solicitous for the maintenance and development of agriculture, and is found upbraiding the Whigs of his day for depressing its interests in favour of commerce, the supposed backbone of their political party. He was remarkably alive to questions of finance and taxation; he carefully watched the beginnings of a system of insurances, and was intent upon measures for improving the sanitary condition of the people, and protecting it against the spread of infectious diseases, even where their cure was an unsolved problem. In reading some of the political pamphlets on which I am about to touch and which turn on the successful conduct of wars, I have been repeatedly struck with the attention he gives to the health of armies and to the sufficiency of the commissariat on which it so largely depends as important elements in their effectiveness. I need hardly say that education was a theme very near to his heart, and that in two directions in particular his farsightedness asserted itself in this field in an extraordinary degree. On the one hand, he perceived the place which, to translate his speculations into the language of the present day, science would come to occupy by the side of the other studies. Humanism, he was convinced, had no prescriptive right to rule the progress of human culture any more than the scholasticism which it had superseded. And we humanists of a later age, who have learnt to ignore the old bugbear at which during the better part of our lives, north or south, we have been constantly told to tremble the fear of the classics being driven to the wall may accept quite cheerfully the sort of apologue which I find in a passage of a letter from Leibniz to Thomas Burnet: "I do not for a moment envy the excellent Mr. Dryden"