and less popular, is still all human and earthly, a fallen brother--and
at the same time that nobly dressed and nobly dreaming writer at the
desk.

That vision of the strengthened and perfected state is protagonist in
my story. But as I re-read "The Prince" and thought out the manner of
my now abandoned project, I came to perceive how that stir and whirl of
human thought one calls by way of embodiment the French Revolution, has
altered absolutely the approach to such a question. Machiavelli, like
Plato and Pythagoras and Confucius two hundred odd decades before him,
saw only one method by which a thinking man, himself not powerful, might
do the work of state building, and that was by seizing the imagination
of a Prince. Directly these men turned their thoughts towards
realisation, their attitudes became--what shall I call it?--secretarial.
Machiavelli, it is true, had some little doubts about the particular
Prince he wanted, whether it was Caesar Borgia of Giuliano or Lorenzo,
but a Prince it had to be. Before I saw clearly the differences of our
own time I searched my mind for the modern equivalent of a Prince. At
various times I redrafted a parallel dedication to the Prince of
Wales, to the Emperor William, to Mr. Evesham, to a certain newspaper
proprietor who was once my schoolfellow at City Merchants', to Mr. J. D.
Rockefeller--all of them men in their several ways and circumstances and
possibilities, princely. Yet in every case my pen bent of its own accord
towards irony because--because, although at first I did not realise it,
I myself am just as free to be a prince. The appeal was unfair. The old
sort of Prince, the old little principality has vanished from the world.
The commonweal is one man's absolute estate and responsibility no more.
In Machiavelli's time it was indeed to an extreme degree one man's
affair. But the days of the Prince who planned and directed and was
the source and centre of all power are ended. We are in a condition of
affairs infinitely more complex, in which every prince and statesman is
something of a servant and every intelligent human being something of
a Prince. No magnificent pensive Lorenzos remain any more in this world
for secretarial hopes.

In a sense it is wonderful how power has vanished, in a sense wonderful
how it has increased. I sit here, an unarmed discredited man, at a small
writing-table in a little defenceless dwelling among the vines, and no
human being can stop my