“The simple plan
That they should take who have the power,
And they should keep who can,”
and he admitted that the rule was indispensable—if you went into politics. This was his crime—High Treason against Idealism. Humanity prefers to be guided by rules which it disavows. The splendid blonde beasts who practised the maxims of Machiavelli shuddered at the scribe who merely stated them. Nowhere probably was disgust with the Florentine writer more vehement than in Venice, which employed assassins as a principle of polity. Could that Turkish “Prince” who decreed that each new monarch of his house must safeguard the dynasty by massacring his swarm of brothers, or that Persian “Prince” who invented the principle of blinding them, have seen the printed “Prince” of Machiavelli, they with their correct Islamic or Zoroastrian principles would have shared in the universal opprobrium.
That the world shudders still is shown by the apologetic attitude of his commentators and even of his panegyrists. Not one but repudiates his system, charitably traces it to the unhappy circumstances of his day, to the welter of force and fraud amid which his lot was cast. Yet are these circumstances essentially changed? The small urban republics have vanished, but in their stead are the Great Powers. Cæsar Borgia and Ezzelino are gone, but we have the Congo Ruler and the Trust Magnate. “Every country hath its Machiavel,” says Sir Thomas Browne, and there is no spot on earth where the maxims of “The Prince” are not in daily operation. The voice may be the voice of Savonarola, but the hands are the hands of Machiavelli.
Nay, it is often the voice of Machiavelli even when it sounds like the voice of Savonarola. For, as Lord Acton subtly pointed out, Machiavellism lurks in many a seemingly innocent and even pious proposition. It is perhaps straining his point to find it in Jeremy Bentham’s “greatest happiness principle,” but who shall doubt but that it is involved in the popular idea that “Time tries all,” and that everything happens for the best in the long run, and that history is, after all, the Will of God? What are all these nebulous notions but the acceptance of success—of the brute fact—as the moral standard? Less obvious than the proposition that “God is on the side of the biggest battalions,” they are substantially identical with it. They simply mean that God was on the side of the biggest battalions. They imply that whichever party triumphed, God was with that party. So that many even of those who reject Machiavelli with loathing are found to be unconsciously Machiavellian.
Hallam in his “Introduction to the Literature of Europe” palliates the darker features of the Machiavellian teaching by the nature of the times, yet in his own “Europe during the Middle Ages,” writing of the rapid decay of Charlemagne’s Empire under his son Louis, “called by the Italians the Pious, and by the French the Debonair or Good-natured,” he says “the fault lay entirely in his heart; and this fault was nothing but a temper too soft and a conscience too strict. It is not wonderful that the Empire should have been speedily dissolved.” And Charlemagne, its peerless founder, is described as having divorced nine wives, beheaded four thousand Saxons in a single day, and executed all who ate flesh during Lent!
It is when I hear the words of Church or Press, Parliaments or Royal Proclamations, that I fall into a rage against language, and even as Sancho Panza blessed the man who invented sleep, I curse the man who invented speech. In the beautiful dumb days the strong rent the weak in sacred simplicity. Now the strong make pious speeches to show that the eupepsia of the universe is their appetite’s aim, and the weak must listen to proofs that they are being eaten for their own good. Happily the serpent no longer talks, else were his slow slimy deglutition of the living rabbit accompanied by a sermon. The State has not only killed Christ but stolen his words. At the Hague the lion and the lamb lie down together, and the concordial words flow on like music, till the lamb suggests that the lion should pare his claws. And the lamb himself—is he anything but a wolf in sheep’s clothing? Is he not at heart envious of claws, always feeling his paws for talons of his own?
“And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee, thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them: thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them.” Where outside Machiavelli shall you find a clean strong sentence like this of Moses? The Destroying Angel’s sword shall be sharp and antiseptic as a surgeon’s knife; he shall leave no writhing torsoes, no half-sawn limbs and festering wounds littering the purlieus of life. But this utterance is too strong for Christian stomachs, it belongs to the fee-fo-fum eye-for-eye period of the Old Testament: with the New entered the reign of ethereal mildness, lilies showering from full hands, festal fountains spouting the milk of human kindness. Well might Wordsworth cry out:
“Earth is sick,