“I should tell how justice also fosters that piety towards God which is the duty of all men, and especially of princes, who ought to love Him above every other thing and direct all their actions to Him as to the true end; and as Xenophon said, to honour and love Him always, but much more when they are in prosperity, so that afterwards they may the more reasonably have confidence to ask Him for mercy when they are in some adversity.[[443]] For it is impossible to govern rightly either one’s self or others without the help of God; who to the good sometimes sends good fortune as His minister to relieve them from grievous perils; sometimes adverse fortune, to prevent their being so lulled by prosperity as to forget Him or human foresight, which often repairs evil fortune, as a good player repairs bad throws of the dice by placing his board well.[[444]] Moreover I should not cease reminding the prince to be truly religious—not superstitious or given to the vanities of incantation and sooth-saying; for by adding divine piety and true religion to human foresight, he would have good fortune too and a protecting God always to increase his prosperity in peace and in war.
33.—“Next I should tell how he ought to love his land and people, not holding them too much in bondage, lest he make himself odious to them, from which thing there arise seditions, conspiracies and a thousand other evils; nor yet in too great freedom, lest he be despised, from which proceed licentious and dissolute life among his people, rapine, theft, murder, without any fear of the law; often the ruin and total destruction of city and realms. Next, how he ought to love those near him according to their degree, maintaining among all men an even equality in some things, as in justice and liberty; and in certain other things a judicious inequality, as in being generous, in rewarding, in distributing honours and dignities according to the inequality of their merits, which always ought not to exceed but to be exceeded by their rewards; and that in this way he would be not merely loved but almost adored by his subjects. Nor would there be need that he should turn to aliens for the safeguard of his life, because his own people for their very profit would guard it with their own, and all men would gladly obey the laws, when they found that he himself obeyed and was as it were the guardian and incorruptible minister of the same; and thus he would make so strong an impression in this matter, that even if he sometimes chanced to infringe the laws in some particular, everyone would feel that it was done for a good end, and the same respect and reverence would be paid to his wish as to the law itself.
“Thus the minds of his subjects would be so tempered that the good would not seek for more than they needed, and the bad could not; for excessive riches are oftentimes the cause of great ruin, as in poor Italy, which has been and still is exposed as a prey to foreign nations, both because of bad government and because of the great riches of which it is full. Hence it were well to have the greater part of the citizens neither very rich nor very poor, for the over-rich often become insolent and rash; the poor, base and dishonest; but men of moderate fortune do not lay snares for others, and live safe from being snared: and being the greater number, these men of moderate fortune are also more powerful; and therefore neither the poor nor the rich can conspire against the prince or other men, nor can they sow seditions; wherefore, in order to avoid this evil, it is a very wholesome thing to preserve a mean in all things.
34.—“I should say then, that the prince ought to employ these and many other suitable precautions, so that there may not arise in his subjects’ mind a desire for new things and for a change of government; which they most often bring to pass either for gain or else for honour which they hope for, or because of loss or else of shame which they fear. And this unrest is engendered in their minds sometimes by hatred and anger driving them to despair, by reason of the wrongs and insults that have been wrought upon them through the avarice, insolence and cruelty or lust of their superiors; sometimes by the contempt that is aroused in them by the neglect and baseness and unworthiness of their princes. These two errours ought to be avoided by winning the people’s love and obedience; as is done by benefiting and rewarding the good, and by prudently and sometimes severely precluding the bad and seditious from becoming powerful, which is much easier to prevent before they have become so than to deprive them of power after they have once acquired it. And I should say that to prevent a subject from running into these errours, there is no better way than to keep him from evil practices, and especially from those that spread little by little; for they are secret pests that infect cities before it is possible to cure or even to detect them.
“By such means I should advise that the prince contrive to keep his subjects in a tranquil state, and to give them the blessings of mind and body and fortune; but those of the body and of fortune, in order to be able to exercise those of the mind, which are the more profitable the greater and more superabundant they are; which is not true of those of the body and of fortune. If, then, the subjects be good and worthy and rightly directed towards the goal of happiness, their prince is a very great lord; for that is a true and great dominion, under which the subjects are good and well governed and well commanded.”
35.—Then my lord Gaspar said:
“I think that he would be a small lord under whom all the subjects were good, for in every place the good are few.”
My lord Ottaviano replied:
“If some Circe were to change all the subjects of the King of France into wild beasts, would he not seem to you a small lord for all he ruled over so many thousand animals?[[445]] And on the other hand, if only the flocks that roam our mountains here for pasture were to become wise men and worthy cavaliers, would you not think that those herdsmen who governed them and were obeyed by them, had become great lords instead of herdsmen? You see then, that it is not the number but the worth of their subjects that makes princes great.”
36.—My lady Duchess and my lady Emilia and all the others had been for a good space very attentive to my lord Ottaviano’s discourse; but since he now made a little pause, as if he had finished his discourse, messer Cesare Gonzaga said: