[1] The Abbe de Saint-Pierre (1658-1743), a churchman without vocation, was a Norman of noble family, and first published his _Memoires pour rendre la Paix Perpetuelle a l'Europe_ in 1722. As Siegler-Pascal well shows (_Les Projets de l'Abbe de Saint-Pierre_, 1900) he was not a mere visionary Utopian, but an acute and far-seeing thinker, practical in his methods, a close observer, an experimentalist, and one of the first to attempt the employment of statistics. He was secretary to the French plenipotentiaries who negotiated the Treaty of Utrecht, and was thus probably put on the track of his scheme. He proposed that the various European states should name plenipotentiaries to form a permanent tribunal of compulsory arbitration for the settlement of all differences. If any state took up arms against one of the allies, the whole confederation would conjointly enter the field, at their conjoint expense, against the offending state. He was opposed to absolute disarmament, an army being necessary to ensure peace, but it must be a joint army composed of contingents from each Power in the confederation. Saint-Pierre, it will be seen, had clearly grasped the essential facts of the situation as we see them to-day. "The author of _The Project of Perpetual Peace_" concludes Prof. Pierre Robert in a sympathetic summary of his career (Petit de Julleville, _Histoire de la Langue et de la Litterature Francaise_, Vol. VI), "is the precursor of the twentieth century." His statue, we cannot doubt, will be a conspicuous object, beside Sully's, on the future Palace of any international tribunal.