ic immorality which lay at the root of
Italy's disunion and weakness; or Savonarola, who insisted that without
a moral reformation no liberty was possible? We shall have to consider
the action of Savonarola in another place. Meanwhile, it is not too much
to affirm that, with diplomatists like Machiavelli, and with princes
like those whom he has idealized, Italy could not be free. Hypocrisy,
treachery, dissimulation, cruelty are the vices of the selfish and the
enslaved. Yet Machiavelli was led by his study of the past and by his
experience of the present to defend these vices, as the necessary
qualities of the prince whom he would fain have chosen for the saviour
of his country. It is legitimate to excuse him on the ground that the
Italians of his age had not conceived a philosophy of right which should
include duties as well as privileges, and which should guard the
interests of the governed no less than those of the governor. It is true
that the feudal conception of Monarchy, so well apprehended by him in
the fourth chapter of the _Principe,_ had nowhere been realized in
Italy, and that therefore the right solution of the political problem
seemed to lie in setting force against force, and fraud against fraud,
for a sublime purpose. It may also be urged with justice that the
historians and speculators of antiquity, esteemed beyond their value by
the students of the sixteenth century, confirmed him in his application
of a positive philosophy to statecraft. The success which attended the
violence and dissimulation of the Romans, as described by Livy, induced
him to inculcate the principles on which they acted. The scientific
method followed by Aristotle in the Politics encouraged him in the
adoption of a similar analysis; while the close parallel between ancient
Greece and mediaeval Italy was sufficient to create a conviction that
the wisdom of the old world would be precisely applicable to the
conditions of the new. These, however, are exculpations of the man
rather than justifications of his theory. The theory was false and
vicious. And the fact remains that the man, impregnated by the bad
morality of the period in which he lived, was incapable of ascending
above it to the truth, was impotent with all his acumen to read the
deepest lessons of past and present history, and in spite of his
acknowledged patriotism succeeded only in adding his conscious and
unconscious testimony to the corruption of the country that he loved