unded was Europe by conflict that it had no stomach for war during a generation. It was a30 time of great industrial prosperity in England, France, and Prussia. Walpole, the wise guardian of peaceful society, dominated the first of these nations, Fleury, also a man of peace, was for a large part of the time the guiding hand in the second, and Frederic William I directed the development of the third with a sure sense of economy and the efficient use of resources. At the same time Austria was under the direction of Charles VI, a peaceful monarch who had too many anxieties at home to think of wars against the Christian sovereigns around him. The small struggles that occurred were without significance; and it was not until 1740, when a new generation was on the scene, that Europe again had a period of general war, precipitated by an imaginative young king who could not resist the temptation to use the excellent tool with which his father had provided him. Out of the twenty years’ struggle that now followed, no new plan arose for a system of coöperation to secure peace, but one of the great philosophers of the time made a new statement of the Abbé St. Pierre’s plan, which served as a new proposition.

31 It was during the last years of the Seven Years’ War that Rousseau received the papers of the good abbé, with the expectation that he would prepare them for publication in a more popular form than the twenty-one volumes in which the author’s thoughts were buried. He eventually gave up the task, but he produced two short summaries, one of which was entitled Extrait du Projet de Paix perpetuelle de M. L’Abbé de Saint-Pierre. The “extract” proper was followed by a “judgment” in which Rousseau voiced his own views. He