[p. 556]
|556| refuted him. But what are called the abominable means which Machiavelli is said to have advised must be regarded from another point of view. Italy was to be one state; this still held as a principle at that time, when the Emperor was still regarded as supreme feudal lord, – and this universal Machiavelli presupposes, this he demands, this is his principle against the misery of his country. From here the procedure of The Prince appears from an entirely different side. What would be abominable if done by a private person against a private person, or by one state against another or against a private person, is now just punishment. Against a state, the bringing about of anarchy is the highest or rather the only crime; for all crimes that the state has to concern itself with tend towards it, and those who attack the state itself, not mediately like other criminals but immediately, are the greatest criminals, and the state has no higher duty than to preserve itself and to destroy the power of these criminals in the surest way. The exercise of this highest duty by the state is no longer a means, it is punishment; or if punishment itself were a means, then every punishment of any criminal would have to be called an abomination, and every state would be in the position of using abominable means, death, long imprisonment, for the sake of its preservation.
The Roman Cato the Younger has the privilege of being paraded by every clamourer for freedom, and he was the greatest promoter [of the plan] that sole rule should be conferred on Pompey, not out of friendship for Pompey but because anarchy was the greater evil; and he killed himself, not because what the Romans at that time still called freedom, anarchy, had perished – for the party of Pompey, with which he stood, was only another party than that of Caesar -, but out of obstinacy of character, which would not submit to its reviled and
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