enuta che
facilmente da uno savio dator di leggi potrebbe essere in qualunque
forma di governo riordinata.'

This is the dominant thought which pervades his treatise on the right
ordering of the State of Florence addressed to Leo X.[1] A more
consummate piece of political mechanism than that devised by Machiavelli
in this essay can hardly be imagined. It is like a clock with separate
actions for hours, minutes, seconds, and the revolutions of the moon and
planets. All the complicated interest of parties and classes in the
state, the traditional pre-eminence of the Medicean family, the rights
of the Church, and the relation of Florence to foreign powers, have been
carefully considered and provided for. The defect of this consummate
work of art is that it remained a mere machine, devised to meet the
exigencies of the moment, and powerless against such perturbations as
the characters and passions of living men must introduce into the
working of a Commonwealth. Had Florence been a colony established in a
new country with no neighbors but savages, or had it been an institution
protected from without against the cupidity of selfish rivals, then
such a constitution might have been imposed on it with profit. But to
expect that a city dominated by ancient prejudices, connected by a
thousand subtle ties not only with the rest of Italy but also with the
states of Europe, and rotten to the core in many of its most important
members, could be restored to pristine vigor by a doctrinaire however
able, was chimerical. The course of events contradicted this vain
expectation. Meanwhile a few clear-headed and positive observers were
dimly conscious of the instability of merely speculative
constitution-making. Varchi, in a weighty passage on the defects of the
Florentine republic, points out that its weakness arose partly from the
violence of factions, but also in a great measure from the implicit
faith reposed in doctors of the law.[2] The history of the Florentine
Constitution, he says, is the history of changes effected by successions
of mutually hostile parties, each in its own interest subverting the
work of its predecessor, and each in turn relying on the theories of
jurists, who without practical genius for politics make arbitrary rules
for the control of state-affairs. Yet even Varchi shares the prevailing
conviction that the proper method is first to excogitate a perfect
political system, and then to impress that like a st