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Updated: May 27, 2025
Indeed that sagacity is so remarkable, that it may naturally occur to the learned reader to inquire, whether Machiavelli's "Prince" had yet been published, and whether King Ferdinand could have read that much-abused manual of crafty statesmen.
Long was it thought that the common domestic title of the devil, "Old Nick," was an abbreviation of Machiavelli's Christian name. Hudibras fathered that myth, but now we know, Mr. Morley says, that the familiar appellation of the Evil One is a remnant of Norse mythology, deriving from Nyke, the water- goblin.
Nor is it important, so long as between the two books there is unity of purpose and agreement of method. The "Greatness and Decadence of the Romans" is a study of philosophic history. In form it is not unlike Machiavelli's Discourses on the first ten books of Livy.
But could not even they be employed to purge the sacred soil of Italy from the Barbarians? If we can pretend to sound the depths of Machiavelli's mind at this distance of time, we may conjecture that he had come to believe the free cities too corrupt for independence. The only chance Italy had of holding her own against the great powers of Europe was by union under a prince.
It was the fourteenth century that gave Lucca her great captain, Castruccio Castracani, the hero of Machiavelli's remarkable sketch, the sketch perhaps for the Prince.
And Roosevelt's analysis of Platt may stand alongside of Machiavelli's portraits of the Italian Bosses four hundred years before they were not called Bosses then.
There have been books of wide and lasting political influence Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Politics, Machiavelli's Prince, Hobbes's Leviathan, Locke's Civil Government, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Paine's Right of Man, Mill's Liberty and The Subjection of Women, Green's Political Obligation, and many more.
Hitherto we have been considering how the state acquired by a conqueror should be incorporated with his previous dominions. The next section of Machiavelli's discourse is by far the most interesting. It treats of principalities created by the arms, personal qualities, and good fortune of adventurers.
Willoughby must have been a dull place to him after his adventures, but he says he was glutted with company, and retired into a woody pasture, surrounded by forests, a good ways from any town, and there built himself a pavilion of boughs less substantial than the cabin of Thoreau at Walden Pond and there he heroically slept in his clothes, studied Machiavelli's "Art of War," read "Marcus Aurelius," and exercised on his horse with lance and ring.
The same writer describes the break-up of all social morality during the civil war in words which seem to herald the destruction not only of Athens but of Greek freedom. Machiavelli's 'Prince' shows how history can repeat itself, reiterating its lesson that a nation which gives itself to immoral aggrandisement is far on the road to disintegration.
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