with the Devil as a summary of the critical tendencies of the preceding century.

Our business is to disregard such easy invective. We must rather seek to remember less the degree to which Machiavelli is himself a 'constant and contemporary influence,' than the degree to which the doctrines he so magistrally summarised are the enduring basis of political action. 'He is,' wrote Lord Acton, 'the earliest conscious and articulate exponent of certain living forces in the present world.' Wherever men feel passionately that their end is so great that it is useless to count the cost, there will be found, consciously or unconsciously, a disciple of Machiavelli. Most notably, of course, this will be the case in a period of revolution; and the student of Lenin's writings, or of the speeches of Mussolini will have no difficulty in detecting the school to which they belong. For every revolutionary leader stands poised upon the edge of an abyss; and to safeguard his precarious hold he will do to others things that, attempted against himself, he pronounces the apogee of wrong. His followers will applaud his power of relentless decision; while his enemies will insist that he debases the moral currency of mankind. So the followers of Lenin have insisted that the excesses of Bolshevism are a small price to pay for its ultimate prospect; and the disciples of Mussolini have excused the outrages of Fascism on the ground that their leader seeks to vaccinate Italy against the virus of Communist doctrine. The advocates of Irish freedom were outraged by the excesses of British troops in Ireland; but they had little difficulty in accepting the violence of Sinn Feiners as the inevitable result of a nation struggling to be free. Republican France, before the war, was horrified by the undemocratic character of Imperial Germany; but its alliance with Tsarist Russia did not, for the most part, revolt the conscience of its citizens.

The temptation, of course, is to throw up one's hands and to insist that man and reason are strangers to one another. Life is a jungle, and the habits of the jungle alone ensure survival. Men are a mean and little breed; and force and fear only can keep them to the straight path. So Machiavelli judged; so, also, the greatest of his English disciples, Thomas Hobbes. And it is possible,

as Lord Acton and a score of other historians have shown, to compile a formidable list of eminent men whose judgment upon the lesson of history is similar in substance. In a way, perhaps, the most striking reflexion of all from whom such comment has come is that of the second Earl Grey. There was no Liberal cause of moment, in the period from the French Revolution to the first Reform Bill, of which he was not a devoted advocate. He endured long years of political disaster rather than surrender the principles of liberty he held dear. His private life was stainless, and the record of his relationship to wife and children has something about it of almost idyllic quality. His tenure of office was brief, less than five years in a political career of nearly half a century; too brief, certainly, for him to have been infected by the poison of power. Yet at the end of his life his final summary was not very different from Machiavelli's: 'I am a great lover of morality, public and private,' he told the Princess Lieven; 'but intercourse of nations cannot be strictly regulated by that rule.' What is this, after all, but the famous maxim of Bacon: 'It is the solecism of power to think to command the end and yet not to endure the means'?

The true answer to Machiavelli's plea is not a simple one. In part, indeed, the answer is one that can be rendered in his own terms. Much of the evidence he considered he seriously misjudged. He wrote of Savonarola that the prophet without arms is doomed to destruction, and in the next generation Calvin arose to confound his maxim. All that he sought for was embodied in Napoleon; and the end was the barren exile of Saint Helena. Bismarck's triumph in 1870 seemed to canonise the doctrine of force and fraud as the midwives of successful policy; but the fruit of Sedan was the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine and the annihilation of the Hohenzollern. To Pilate, doubtless, Christ was an incident destructive of the peaceful process of administration; yet he proved that the authority of moral appeal is, in the long run, not less potent than the might of armed legions.

That is not to say that force and fraud have not

won their victories. To act upon a disbelief in the possibilities of human good has, only too often, brought immense reward. Against its underlying view, we are at least entitled to argue two things. We can say, firstly, that its antithesis is not less true; belief that human nature can be trusted has, at least as often, brought a great reward to its adherents. We can, in the second place, argue with historic justice on our side, that the doctrine of means as the slave of ends is, in its Machiavellian form, incomplete and inadequate. For it is the sober lesson of the record that the means enter into the end and transform it. The Jesuits served a great ideal, but the way in which they served it made the end itself meaningless to them. That imperialist school which sought to confer the blessings of Western civilisation on Africa and the ancient East, were the protagonists of a high cause; but the Congo showed that men who are careless in their instruments soon come to disregard their original purpose. The roots of loyalty are ultimately moral in character; and over any lengthy period men can be won to the service of others only in proportion as the purpose they are asked to follow is a high one. Seven centuries of force did not win the affection of Ireland for Great Britain; Austria even yet drains the cup she had prepared for. Italian consumption. Power, in brief, is never long accorded to minds incapable of great purposes and prepared to achieve them by means correspondingly generous. For a leader cannot count upon followers whose support is a matter of purchase. In the final assessment, his supporters will always act upon the motives he assumes them to possess.

Another aspect of this problem is important. For the most part, even in the internal aspect of the state, the will that Machiavelli considers is one that does not seek the consent of those upon whom it is to be imposed. Fragile though it is, modern constitutionalism has shown that there exists at least a wide prospect of achieving this result. Where a whole people participates in political life, where the sense of interest in the political drama is widely diffused, and the education to understand it as wide as the interest, most Machiavellian axioms are, a priori, at a discount. It is doubt

less true, as Sir Henry Maine once argued, that the pathology of party conflict is as susceptible now as in other realms and ages to the analysis Machiavelli made: certainly, the 'boss' of an American State or city has recognisable kinship with the condottiere of 16thcentury Italy. Parties will attain power by fraud and deliberate deceit; but what is important in the modern democratic State is the fact that they cannot hope by those means to retain power for long. Government by discussion engenders a capacity for self-regeneration to which no other system, however powerful in appearance, can pretend. It is, of course, vital that the discussion shall be free; and it is not less urgent that men should be prepared to abide by its results. Yet the history of Europe and America since the middle of the 18th century does suggest a growing sensitiveness to the infliction of unnecessary pain which sets ever higher standards in national conduct and national legislation. We move, it may be, at a snail's pace, and upon an irregular front; but it would be sheer blindness in the face of the facts to deny that we move.

It would be folly, of course, to deny that there has been no corresponding and proportional improvement in international relationships; there, at least, the maxims of Machiavellianism have retained no small degree of their former empire. Raison d'état has been held, even among high-minded men, to justify activities which they would, in their own interests, refuse with passion to contemplate. The sentiment of nationalism still persuades men and peoples to crimes that the detached observer cannot for a moment condone. Yet, even here, an unmixed pessimism is beyond the evidence. It is important that the diplomacy of the Bismarckian epoch should have issued in the great war. For there was demonstrated, beyond the possibility of error, the price we have to pay for acting upon the assumption that nations stand in the posture of gladiators and may hew their way to success. What war has shown is not merely the cost of violating the necessary foundations of human well-being to those who provide at least the immediate occasion thereof, but, not less clearly, that a Carthaginian peace is something less than a Pyrrhic victory. It became clear that the weapons now at the

disposal of men prepared to will war can have no other result than to make civilisation a mere legend of memory. In the result men have turned seriously for the first time to organise that hinterland between peoples where, formerly, the unbridled licence of the sovereign state held sway. Naturally enough, the work is as yet partial and fragmentary. But it is important to notice that no other effort in our own time has enlisted on its behalf a passion so widespread or so intense. Reason of state was, a decade ago, a ground for resisting international obligation; a generation hence, and it may well be a cause for insisting upon its observance.

Nothing of this can be taken to mean that we have the right to optimism. The forces which contend for mastery in the modern world are dark and vast, and they are impatient for victory. Many of them are still willing to risk all on some gambler's throw of the dice. Others are driven to rebellion by persecution that is as unintelligent in its inception as it is pernicious in its execution. We have to pin our faith to the frail bark of reason in a sea of stormy waters. We know the inevitability of change; we know, also, that no great change can be effected without touching interests which are powerful enough, if they so will, to repel its onset, and it appears, often enough, as though the choice before us is between self-sacrifice and conflict.

It is to the former that those must look who seek the means of response to Machiavelli. For conflict means the re-emergence of a world like the Italy he knew in which every man who seeks power is destined to become an Ishmael. Certainly to abandon the path of change by ordered discussion means the passage of power to men who have rarely been tried by service, and are often incapable of disinterestedness. It was a common saying of Mr Gladstone's that of all the characters he met in his varied experience of life politicians were the most mysterious. In a normal time what is worst in the lust for power is inhibited by the call of tradition and the necessity for compromise. But in an epoch of conflict the dark uncertainties call for audacious men capable of desperate expedients. It is futile in such periods to seek for moderation or for