ween States the code of individual ethics is necessarily annulled;
but to suggest that the laws which regulate the actions or the
suffering of States, as such, have too peremptorily been assumed to be,
by nature and the ground-plan of the universe, identical with the laws
of individual life, its actions or its sufferings, and that it is
something of a _petitio principii_, in the present stage of our
knowledge, to judge the one by the standards applicable only to the
other.

The profoundest students of the actions of States have in all times
been aware, not of the fixed antagonism, but of the essential
distinction, between the two codes. Every principle of Machiavelli is
implicit in Thucydides, and Sulla, whom Montesquieu selects as the
supreme type of Roman grandeur, does but follow principles which
reappear in the politics of an Innocent III or a Richelieu, a Cromwell
or an Oxenstiern.[1] The loss of Sulla's _Commentaries_[2] is
irreparable as the loss of the fifth book of the _Annals_ of Tacitus or
the burnt _Memoirs_ of Shaftesbury; in the literature of politics it is
a disaster without a parallel. What Sulla felt as a first, most living
impulse appears in later times as a colder, a critical judgment. It is
thus that it presents itself to Machiavelli, not the writer of that
_jeu d'esprit_, _Il Principe_, perplexing as _Hamlet_, and as variously
interpreted, but the author of the stately periods of the _Istorie_ and
the _Discorsi_, the haughtiest of speculators, and in politics the
profoundest of modern thinkers. M. Sorel encounters little difficulty
in proving that the diplomacy of Europe in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries is but an exposition of the principles of the
_Discorsi_; Frederick the Great, who started his literary activity by
the refutation of the _Prince_, began and ended his political career as
if his one aim were to illustrate the maxims that in the rashness of
inexperience he had condemned; and within living memory, the vindicator
of Oliver Cromwell found in the composition of the same Frederick's
history the solace and the torment of his last and greatest years.

To press this inquiry further would be foreign to the present subject;
enough has been said to indicate that from whatever deep unity they may
spring, the laws which determine the life of a State, as displayed in
History, are not identical with the laws of individual life. The
region of Art, however, seems to offer a neutral t