are united together, and inclined to obey their own masters.  Machiavelli enforces this moral by one of those rare but energetic figures which add virile dignity to his discourse.  He compares auxiliary troops to the armor of Saul, which David refused, preferring to fight Goliath with his stone and sling.  ’In one word, arms borrowed from another either fall from your back, or weigh you down, or impede your action.’  It remains for a prince to form his own troops and to take the field in person, like Cesare Borgia, when he discarded his French allies and the mercenary aid of the Orsini captains.  Republics should follow the same course, dispatching, as the Romans did, their own citizens to the war, and controlling by law the personal ambition of victorious generals.  It was thus that the Venetians prospered in their conquests, before they acquired their provinces in Italy and adopted the Condottiere system from their neighbors.  ’A prince, therefore, should have but one object, one thought, one art—­the art of war.’  Those who have followed this rule have attained to sovereignty, like Francesco Sforza, who became Duke of Milan; those who have neglected it have lost even hereditary kingdoms, like the last Sforzas, who sank from dukedom into private life.  Even amid the pleasures of the chase a prince should always be studying the geographical conformation of his country with a view to its defense, and should acquire a minute knowledge of such strategical laws as are everywhere applicable.  He should read history with the same object, and should keep before his eyes the example of those great men of the past from whom he can learn lessons for his guidance in the present.

This brings us to the peroration of the Principe, which contains the practical issue toward which the whole treatise has been tending, the patriotic thought that reflects a kind of luster even on the darkest pages that have gone before.  Like Thetis, Machiavelli has dipped his Achilles in the Styx of infernal counsels; like Cheiron, he has shown him how the human and the bestial natures should be combined in one who has to break the teeth of wolves and keep his feet from snares; like Hephaistos, he has forged for him invulnerable armor.  The object toward which this preparation has been leading is the liberation of Italy from the barbarians.  The slavery of Israel in Egypt, the oppression of the Persians by the Medes, the dispersion of the Athenians into villages, were the occasions which enabled Moses and Cyrus and Theseus to display their greatness.  The new Prince, who would fain win honor in Italy and confer upon his country untold benefits, finds her at the present moment ’more enslaved than the Hebrews, more downtrodden than the Persians, more disunited than the Athenians, without a chief, without order, beaten, despoiled, mangled, overrun, subject to every sort of desolation.’  Fortune could not have offered him a nobler opportunity.  ’See how she prays God to send her some one who