egarded, which assumes

a separation between statecraft and morality, which
recognizes force and fraud among the legitimate means of
attaining high political ends, which makes success alone the
test of conduct and which presupposes the corruption,
baseness, and venality of mankind at large.

Even the age of Cesare Borgia revolted against this philosophy and the
name of Machiavelli became a byword. "Am I a Machiavel?" says the host
in _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, and the implication of this question
indirectly manifests the revolt of the seventeenth century against the
sinister philosophy of the great Florentine.

Nothing can be more amazing than that not only leading militarists of
Germany but many of its foremost philosophers and teachers have become
so intoxicated with the dream of Pan-Germanism that in the utmost
sincerity they have espoused and with a certain pride proclaimed the
vicious principles of Machiavelli in all their moral nudity. There is
an emotional and mystical element in the advanced German thinker,
which makes him capable of accepting in full sincerity intellectual
and moral absurdities of which the more robust common sense of other
nations would be incapable. The advanced German doctrinaire is the
"wisest fool in Christendom." The depth of his learning is generally
in the inverse ratio to the shallowness of his common sense.

Nothing better demonstrates this than the present negation by advanced
and doubtless sincere German thinkers of the very foundations of
public morality and indeed of civilization. They have been led with
Nietzsche to revile the Beatitudes and exalt the supremacy of cruelty
over mercy. Indeed Treitschke in his lectures on _Politik_, which have
become the gospel of Junkerdom, avowedly based his gospel of force
upon the teaching of Machiavelli, for he points out that it was
Machiavelli who first clearly saw that the State is power (_der Staat
ist Macht_). Therefore "to care for this power is the highest moral
duty of the State" and "of all political weaknesses that of feebleness
is the most abominable and despicable; it is the sin against the holy
spirit of politics." He therefore holds that the State as the ultimate
good "cannot bind its will for the future over against other States,"
and that international treaties are therefore only obligatory "for
such time as the State may find to be convenient."

To enforce the will of the nation contrary to its