Il Principe (English, Italian, Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: the doctrine of the justice of History, of judgment by results, the nursling of the nineteenth century, from which a sharp incline leads to The Prince. When we say that public life is not an affair of morality, that there is no available rule of right and wrong, that men must be judged by their age, that the code shifts with the longitude, that the wisdom which governs the event is superior to our own, we carry obscurely tribute to the system which bears so odious a name. Few would scruple to maintain with Mr. Morley, that the equity of history requires that we shall judge men of action by the standards of men of action; or with Retz: Les vices d'un archevque peuvent tre, dans une infinite de rencontres, les vertus d'un chef de parti. The expounder of Adam Smith to France, J. B. Say, confirms the ambitious Coadjutor: Louis XIV et son despotisme et ses guerres n'ont jamais fait le mal qui serait result des conseils de ce bon Fnelon, l'aptre et le martyr de la vertu et du bien des hommes. Most successful public men deprecate what Sir Henry Taylor calls much weak sensibility of conscience, and approve Lord Grey's language to Princess Lieven: ' I am a great lover of morality, public and private; but the intercourse of nations cannot be strictly regulated by that rule.' While Burke was denouncing the Revolution, Walpole wrote: ' No great country was ever saved by good men, because good men will not go the lengths that may be necessary.' All which had been formerly anticipated by Pole: Quanto quis privatam vitam agens Christi similior erit tanto minus aptus ad regendum id munus iudicio hominum existi- mabitur. The main principle of Machiavelli is asserted by his most eminent English disciple: ' It is the solecism of power to think to command the end, and yet not to endure th...