to his business and bosom.  To ensure prominence for such a book, to engage attention and incidentally perhaps to obtain political employment for himself, he dedicated it to Lorenzo de’ Medici, the existing and accepted Chief of the State.  But far and above such lighter motives stood the fact that he saw in Lorenzo the only man who might conceivably bring to being the vast dream of patriotism which the writer had imagined.  The subject he proposed to himself was largely, though not wholly, conditioned by the time and place in which he lived.  He wrote for his countrymen and he wrote for his own generation.  He had heard with his ears and seen with his eyes the alternate rending anarchy and moaning paralysis of Italy.  He had seen what Agricola had long before been spared the sight of.  And what he saw, he saw not through a glass darkly or distorted, but in the whitest, driest light, without flinching and face to face.  ‘We are much beholden,’ writes Bacon, ’to Machiavelli and others that wrote what men do, and not what they ought to do.’  He did not despair of Italy, he did not despair even of Italian unity.  But he despaired of what he saw around him, and he was willing at almost any price to end it.  He recognised, despite the nominal example of Venice, that a Republican system was impossible, and that the small Principalities and Free Cities were corrupt beyond hope of healing.  A strong central unifying government was imperative, and at that day such government could only be vested in a single man.  For it must ever be closely remembered, as will be pointed out again, that throughout the book the Prince is what would now be called the Government.  And then he saw with faithful prophecy, in the splendid peroration of his hope, a hope deferred for near four hundred years, he saw beyond the painful paths of blood and tyranny, a vision of deliverance and union.  For at least it is plain that in all things Machiavelli was a passionate patriot, and Amo la patria mia piu dell’ anima is found in one of the last of many thousand letters that his untiring pen had written.

The purpose, then, of The Prince is to lay down rules, within the possibilities of the time, for the making of a man who shall create, increase, and maintain a strong and stable government.  This is done in the main by a plain presentation of facts, a presentation condensed and critical but based on men and things as they actually were.  The ethical side is wholly omitted:  the social and economical almost entirely.  The aspect is purely political, with the underlying thought, it may be supposed, that under the postulated government, all else will prosper.

[Sidenote:  The Book; New States.]