permit a second mistake to be made in attempting
to crush him; judging that such an attempt would be the ruin of the
State, as in truth it proved after his death. For some who survived him,
disregarding his counsels, combined against Cosimo and banished him from
Florence. And so it came about that the partisans of Cosimo, angry at
the wrong done him, soon afterwards recalled him and made him prince of
the republic, a dignity he never would have reached but for this open
opposition. The very same thing happened in Rome in the case of Caesar.
For his services having gained him the good-will of Pompey and other
citizens, their favour was presently turned to fear, as Cicero testifies
where he says that "it was late that Pompey began to fear Caesar." This
fear led men to think of remedies, and the remedies to which they
resorted accelerated the destruction of the republic.

I say, then, that since it is difficult to recognize these disorders in
their beginning, because of the false impressions which things produce
at the first, it is a wiser course when they become known, to temporize
with them than to oppose them; for when you temporize, either they die
out of themselves, or at any rate the injury they do is deferred. And
the prince who would suppress such disorders or oppose himself to their
force and onset, must always be on his guard, lest he help where he
would hinder, retard when he would advance, and drown the plant he
thinks to water. He must therefore study well the symptoms of the
disease; and, if he believe himself equal to the cure, grapple with it
fearlessly; if not, he must let it be, and not attempt to treat it in
any way. For, otherwise, it will fare with him as it fared with those
neighbours of Rome, for whom it would have been safer, after that city
had grown to be so great, to have sought to soothe and restrain her by
peaceful arts, than to provoke her by open war to contrive new means of
attack and new methods of defence. For this league had no other effect
than to make the Romans more united and resolute than before, and to
bethink themselves of new expedients whereby their power was still more
rapidly advanced; among which was the creation of a dictator; for this
innovation not only enabled them to surmount the dangers which then
threatened them, but was afterwards the means of escaping infinite
calamities into which, without it, the republic must have fallen.

CHAPTER XXXIV.--_That the authority o