[p. 555]
|555| reason and the experience of the French frenzy for freedom, are not sufficient to raise the truth that freedom is possible only in the lawful union of a people into a state to the belief of peoples or to a principle of a science of the state.
Even the purpose which Machiavelli puts first, to raise Italy to a state, is misjudged by the blindness which recognises in Machiavelli’s work nothing but the founding of a tyranny, a golden mirror for an ambitious oppressor. But even if it is granted, then, [it] is said, the means are abominable, and there morality has wide scope to trot out its trivialities, that the end does not sanctify the means, etc. Here, however, there can be no question of a choice of means: gangrenous limbs cannot be healed with lavender water; a condition in which poison and assassination have become customary weapons tolerates no gentle counter-attempts. Life close to putrefaction can be reorganised only by the most violent procedure.
It is highly unreasonable to treat the execution of an idea drawn directly from the intuition of the condition of Italy as an indifferent compendium of moral-political principles, suited to all conditions, that is, therefore to none. One must approach the reading of The Prince directly from the history of the centuries that had elapsed before Machiavelli and the contemporary history of Italy, with the impression which that history has given; and it will appear not [only] justified but as a supremely great and true conception of a genuine political head of the greatest and noblest sense.
It would not be superfluous to say something of what is usually overlooked, namely of the remaining truly ideal demands which Machiavelli makes of an excellent prince and which have surely been fulfilled by no prince since that time, and not [even by] the one who
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