gross an example of political jugglery and falsehood, as ever disgraced
the annals of diplomacy. [6]

But it is altogether improbable, as I have before remarked, that a monarch
so astute and habitually cautious should have intrusted unlimited
authority, in so delicate a business, to a person whose discretion,
independent of his known partiality for the French monarch, he held so
lightly. It is much more likely that he limited, as is often done, the
full powers committed to him in public, by private instructions of the
most explicit character; and that the archduke was betrayed by his own
vanity, and perhaps ambition (for the treaty threw the immediate power
into his own hands), into arrangements unwarranted by the tenor of these
instructions. [7]

If this were the case, the propriety of Ferdinand's conduct in refusing
the ratification depends on the question how far a sovereign is bound by
the acts of a plenipotentiary who departs from his private instructions.
Formerly, the question would seem to have been unsettled. Indeed, some of
the most respectable writers on public law in the beginning of the
seventeenth century maintain, that such a departure would not justify the
prince in withholding his ratification; deciding thus, no doubt, on
principles of natural equity, which appear to require that a principal
should be held responsible for the acts of an agent, coming within the
scope of his powers, though at variance with his secret orders, with which
the other contracting party can have no acquaintance or concern. [8]

The inconvenience, however, arising from adopting a principle in political
negotiations, which must necessarily place the destinies of a whole nation
in the hands of a single individual, rash or incompetent, it may be,
without the power of interference or supervision on the part of the