thought, his great contribution to political literature, was that the moral obligations upon ordinary men cannot bind princes.[1]
There is a disposition to ascribe the virtue of patriotism to Machiavelli because he suggested that Italy, which was weak and divided—she had been invaded by the Turks and saved from conquest only by the death of the Sultan Muhammad, and she was being fought over by the French and Spanish as though she was something inanimate—might be united and strong; but he saw in that possibility only a great opportunity for a prince. And he advocated a national army only because he saw the Italian method of carrying on war by hiring bands of foreign mercenaries was a hopeless one. At any time such troops might go over to a better paymaster or decide to plunder the state they protected. He had been deeply impressed by the victories of the Swiss over the Milanese, but he never fathomed the secret of the free spirit that made those victories possible. The Florentine militia he created was a complete failure. He was a man born blind to the qualities that make peoples free and nations great.
Yet this morally blind man was living in a little world of morally blind men. It is clear that his style of thought was the style of thought of the court of his time. Behind the princes of the new states that had grown up out of the wreckage of the empire and the failure of the Church, there were everywhere chancellors and secretaries and trusted ministers of the Machiavellian type. Cromwell, for instance, the minister of Henry VIII of England after his breach with Rome, regarded Machiavelli's Prince as
- ↑ E. B. writes as follows: "I think better of Machiavelli than you do, and especially on two points. (1) He raises a real issue—whether, when a crisis besets the State, the ruler is not bound to abandon the rules of private morality, if by doing so he can preserve the State. If he abandons those rules, he does wrong—and Machiavelli admits that—but, at the same time, as the agent and organ of the State, he does right by preserving it, so far, at any rate, as it is right that it should be preserved. This is a real issue, which one cannot simply dismiss. E.g., all war is wrong, by the rules of private morality, because it is killing; but it may have a qualified and conditioned rightness if it is necessary to preserve the State, and if the State, as a scheme of good life, ought to be preserved. (2) Machiavelli did believe in the people. He only exalts the new prince, who arises to restore order and security in a troubled State. In normal times he believes that the people is a good judge of men: that 'better than many fortresses is not to be hated by the people'; that the trite proverb, 'He who founds himself on the people founds himself on mud,' is untrue, except as applied to demagogues."
