[Sidenote:  The New Model.]

But he centred his observation and imagination on the origin, character, and discipline of an army in being.  He pictures the horror, waste, and failure of a mercenary system, and lays down the fatal error in Italy of separating civil from military life, converting the latter into a trade.  In such a way the soldier grows to a beast, and the citizen to a coward.  All this must be changed.  The basic idea of this astounding Secretary is to form a National Army, furnished by conscription and informed by the spirit of the New Model of Cromwell.  All able-bodied men between the ages of seventeen and forty should be drilled on stated days and be kept in constant readiness.  Once or twice a year each battalion must be mobilised and manoeuvred as in time of war.  The discipline must be constant and severe.  The men must be not only robust and well-trained, but, above all, virtuous, modest, and disposed to any sacrifice for the public good.  So imbued should they be with duty and lofty devotion to their country that though they may rightly deceive the enemy, reward the enemy’s deserters and employ spies, yet ’an apple tree laden with fruit might stand untouched in the midst of their encampment.’  The infantry should far exceed the cavalry, ’since it is by infantry that battles are won.’  Secrecy, mobility, and familiarity with the country are to be objects of special care, and positions should be chosen from which advance is safer than retreat.  In war this army must be led by one single leader, and, when peace shines again, they must go back contented to their grateful fellow-countrymen and their wonted ways of living.  The conception and foundation of such a scheme, at such a time, by such a man is indeed astounding.  He broke with the past and with all contemporary organisations.  He forecast the future of military Europe, though his own Italy was the last to win her redemption through his plans.  ‘Taken all in all,’ says a German military writer, ’we may recognise Machiavelli in his inspired knowledge of the principles of universal military discipline as a true prophet and as one of the weightiest thinkers in the field of military construction and constitution.  He penetrated the essence of military technique with a precision wholly alien to his period, and it is, so to say, a new psychological proof of the relationship between the art of war and the art of statecraft, that the founder of Modern Politics is also the first of modern Military Classics.’

But woe to the Florentine Secretary with his thoughts born centuries before their time.  As in The Prince, so in the Art of War, he closes with a passionate appeal of great sorrow and the smallest ray of hope.  Where shall I hope to find the things that I have told of?  What is Italy to-day?  What are the Italians?  Enervated, impotent, vile.  Wherefore, ’I lament mee of nature, the which either ought not to have made mee a knower of this,