More than any other nation Germany has suffered from war. Without that fatal gift of beauty, “a dowry fraught with never-ending pain,” which tempted the foreigner to Italy, her lot has been hardly less wretched; but Germany has differed from Italy in the successful bravery with which she repelled the invader. Tacitus says of her people, that, “surrounded by numerous and very powerful nations, they are safe, not by obsequiousness, but by battles and braving danger”;[222] and this same character, thus epigrammatically presented, has continued ever since. Yet this was not without that painful experience which teaches what Art has so often attempted to picture and Eloquence to describe, “The Miseries of War.” Again in that same fearless spirit has Germany driven back the invader, while War is seen anew in its atrocious works. But it was not merely the Miseries of War which Germans regarded. The German mind is philosophical and scientific, and it early saw the irrational character of the War System. It is well known that Henry the Fourth of France conceived the idea of Harmony among Nations without War; and his plan was taken up and elaborated in numerous writings by the good Abbé de Saint-Pierre, so that he made it his own. Rousseau, in his treatise on the subject,[223] popularized Saint-Pierre. But it is to Germany that we must look for the most complete and practical development of this beautiful idea. If French in origin, it is German now in authority. The greatest minds in Germany have dealt with this problem, and given to its solution the exactness of science. No greater have been applied to any question. Foremost in this list, in time and in fame, is Leibnitz, that marvel of human intelligence, second, perhaps, to none in history, who, on reading the “Project of Perpetual Peace” by the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, pronounced this judgment: “I have read it with attention, and am persuaded that such a project is on the whole feasible, and that its execution would be one of the most useful things in the world.”[224] Thus did Leibnitz affirm its feasibility and its immense usefulness. Other minds followed, in no apparent concert, but in unison. I may be pardoned, if, without being too bibliographical, I name some of these witnesses.