It seems to have been the great object of the emperor’s life to secure the crown of Austria for his daughters.  It was an exceedingly disgraceful act.  There was no single respectable reason to be brought forward why his daughters should crowd from the throne the daughters of his elder deceased brother, the Emperor Joseph.  Charles was so aware of the gross injustice of the deed, and that the ordinary integrity of humanity would rise against him, that he felt the necessity of exhausting all the arts of diplomacy to secure for his daughters the pledged support of the surrounding thrones.  He had now by intrigues of many years obtained the guarantee of the Pragmatic Sanction from Russia, Prussia, Holland, Spain and England.  France still refused her pledge, as did also many of the minor States of the empire.  The emperor, encouraged by the success he had thus far met with, pushed his efforts with renewed vigor, and in January, 1732, exulted that he had gained the guarantee of the Pragmatic Sanction from all the Germanic body, with the exception of Bavaria, Palatine and Saxony.

And now a new difficulty arose to embroil Europe in trouble.  When Charles XII., like a thunderbolt of war, burst upon Poland, he drove Augustus II. from the throne, and placed upon it Stanislaus Leczinski, a Polish noble, whom he had picked up by the way, and whose heroic character secured the admiration of this semi-insane monarch.  Augustus, utterly crushed, was compelled by his eccentric victor to send the crown jewels and the archives, with a letter of congratulation, to Stanislaus.  This was in the year 1706.  Three years after this, in 1709, Charles XII. suffered a memorable defeat at Pultowa.  Augustus II., then at the head of an army, regained his kingdom, and Stanislaus fled in disguise.  After numerous adventures and fearful afflictions, the court of France offered him a retreat in Wissembourg in Alsace.  Here the ex-king remained for six years, when his beautiful daughter Mary was selected to take the place of the rejected Mary of Spain, as the wife of the young dauphin, Louis XV.

In the year 1733 Augustus II. died.  In anticipation of this event Austria had been very busy, hoping to secure the elective crown of Poland for the son of Augustus who had inherited his father’s name, and who had promised to support the Pragmatic Sanction.  France was equally busy in the endeavor to place the scepter of Poland in the hand of Stanislaus, father of the queen.  From the time of the marriage of his daughter with Louis XV., Stanislaus received a handsome pension from the French treasury, maintained a court of regal splendor, and received all the honors due to a sovereign.  All the energies of the French court were now aroused to secure the crown for Stanislaus.  Russia, Prussia and Austria were in natural sympathy.  They wished to secure the alliance of Poland, and were also both anxious to destroy the republican principle of electing rulers, and to introduce hereditary