vellism,
carried to a point probably never dreamt of by the Italian philosopher,
has run through the whole struggle of Prussia for supremacy and at the
same time through each outbreak of world revolution in which Prussian
influence has played a part. Thus the Ems telegram in 1870, the false
report that tricked Russia into mobilization in 1914,[776] the violation
of treaties and of all the laws of civilised warfare during the recent
war, were the direct outcome of doctrines that may be found in embryo in
_The Prince_. So also the most striking characteristic of the French
Revolution under the inspiration of Weishaupt's emissaries and the
agents of Prussia, and of the present revolutionary movement inaugurated
by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, is not so much its violence as its
Machiavellian cunning. The art popularly known to-day as
_camouflage_--of dressing-up one design under the guise of something
quite different, of making black appear white by glorifying the most
ignoble actions, of making white appear black by holding up all
honourable traditions to contempt and ridicule, in a word
_perversion_--has been reduced to a system by the secret directors of
world revolution. It is here that we can detect the non-proletarian
character of the movement. The working-man of all countries is the least
Machiavellian of beings; his weakness lies in the fact that he is too
inarticulate, that he does not know how to put his case even when he has
a good one, still less to make a bad one appear plausible. It was not
until world revolution was taken over by the faction described by
Bakunin as "the German-Jew Company" that it reassumed its Machiavellian
character and gradually became the formidable organization it is to-day.

A few extracts from _The Prince_ will show how closely both the
Prussians and the Terrorists of France and Russia have followed
Machiavelli's manual for despots:

"He who usurps the government of any State is to execute and put in
practice all the cruelties which he thinks material at once, that he may
have no occasion to renew them often," etc.[777] (Vide the German
principle of "frightfulness" to be exercised against the inhabitants of
invaded territory and the plan of the French and Russian Terrorists in
suppressing "counter-revolutionaries.")

"It is of such importance to a prince to take upon him the nature and
disposition of a beast; of all the whole flock he ought to imitate the
lion and the fox."[778](