ublic, as a reward
to any citizen who served it well, ordained triumphs and all the other
honours which it had to bestow; while against those who sought to
aggrandize themselves by secret intrigues, it ordained accusations and
impeachment; and when, from the people being blinded by a false show of
benevolence, these proved insufficient, it provided for a dictator, who
with regal authority might bring to bounds any who had strayed beyond
them, as instanced in the case of Spurius Melius. And if conduct like
his be ever suffered to pass unchastised, it may well be the ruin of a
republic, for men when they have such examples set them are not easily
led back into the right path.

CHAPTER XXIX.--_That the Faults of a People are due to its Prince._

Let no prince complain of the faults committed by a people under his
control; since these must be ascribed either to his negligence, or to
his being himself blemished by similar defects. And were any one to
consider what peoples in our own times have been most given to robbery
and other like offences, he would find that they have only copied their
rulers, who have themselves been of a like nature. Romagna, before those
lords who ruled it were driven out by Pope Alexander VI., was a nursery
of all the worst crimes, the slightest occasion giving rise to wholesale
rapine and murder. This resulted from the wickedness of these lords, and
not, as they asserted, from the evil disposition of their subjects. For
these princes being poor, yet choosing to live as though they were rich,
were forced to resort to cruelties innumerable and practised in divers
ways; and among other shameful devices contrived by them to extort
money, they would pass laws prohibiting certain acts, and then be the
first to give occasion for breaking them; nor would they chastise
offenders until they saw many involved in the same offence; when they
fell to punishing, not from any zeal for the laws which they had made,
but out of greed to realize the penalty. Whence flowed many mischiefs,
and more particularly this, that the people being impoverished, but not
corrected, sought to make good their injuries at the expense of others
weaker than themselves. And thus there sprang up all those evils spoken
of above, whereof the prince is the true cause.

The truth of what I say is confirmed by Titus Livius where he relates
how the Roman envoys, who were conveying the spoils of the Veientines as
an offering to Apollo, we