welfare of our country, then justice or injustice, mercy or cruelty, praise or ignominy, must be set aside, and we must seek alone whatever course may preserve the existence and liberty of the state.’  Throughout the Discorsi, Machiavelli in a looser and more expansive form, suggests, discusses, or re-affirms the ideas of The Prince.  There is the same absence of judgment on the moral value of individual conduct; the same keen decision of its practical effect as a political act.  But here more than in The Prince, he deals with the action and conduct of the people.  With his passion for personal and contemporary incarnation he finds in the Swiss of his day the Romans of Republican Rome, and reiterates the comparison in detail.  Feudalism, mercenaries, political associations embodied in Arts and Guilds, the Temporal power of the Church, all these are put away, and in their stead he announces the new and daring gospel that for organic unity subjects must be treated as equals and not as inferiors.  ‘Trust the people’ is a maxim he repeats and enforces again and again.  And he does not shrink from, but rather urges the corollary, ‘Arm the people.’  Indeed it were no audacious paradox to state the ideal of Machiavelli, though he nominally preferred a Republic, as a Limited Monarchy, ruling over a Nation in Arms.  No doubt he sought, as was natural enough in his day, to construct the State from without rather than to guide and encourage its evolution from within.  It seemed to him that, in such an ocean of corruption, Force was a remedy and Fraud no sluttish handmaid.  ‘Vice n’est-ce pas,’ writes Montaigne, of such violent acts of Government, ’car il a quitte sa raison a une plus universelle et puissante raison.’  Even so the Prince and the people could only be justified by results.  But the public life is of larger value than the private, and sometimes one man must be crucified for a thousand.  Despite all prejudice and make-belief, such a rule and practice has obtained from the Assemblies of Athens to the Parliaments of the twentieth century.  But Machiavelli first candidly imparted it to the unwilling consciences and brains of men, and it is he who has been the chosen scape-goat to carry the sins of the people.  His earnestness makes him belie his own precept to keep the name and take away the thing.  In this, as in a thousand instances, he was not too darkly hidden; he was too plain.  ‘Machiavelli,’ says one who studied the Florentine as hardly another had done, ’Machiavelli hat gesuendigt, aber noch mehr ist gegen ihn gesuendigt worden.’  Liberty is good, but Unity is its only sure foundation.  It is the way to the Unity of Government and People that the thoughts both of The Prince and the Discorsi lead, though the incidents be so nakedly presented as to shock the timorous and vex the prurient, the puritan, and the evil thinker.  The people must obey the State and fight and die for its salvation, and for the Prince the hatred of the subjects is never good, but their love, and the best way to gain it is by ’not interrupting the subject in the quiet enjoyment of his estate.’  Even so bland and gentle a spirit as the poet Gray cannot but comment, ’I rejoice when I see Machiavelli defended or illustrated, who to me appears one of the wisest men that any nation in any age hath produced.’