[p. 558]
|558| the misunderstanding and hatred against Machiavelli’s Prince, in the particular fate of this work, is that out of a kind of instinct a future monarch, whose whole life and deeds have most clearly expressed the dissolution of the German state into independent states, made his school exercise on this Machiavelli and set moral chriae against him, whose emptiness he himself showed both by his manner of acting and expressly in his writings, in that, for example, in the preface to the History of the First Silesian War he denies the treaties of states their binding force when they no longer conform to the best interest of a state.
Otherwise, however, the more cunning public, which could not leave the genius in Machiavelli’s works unnoticed and at the same time thought too morally to approve his princi[ples], but, well-meaning, nevertheless wished to save him himself, united this contradiction honestly and subtly enough to the effect that Machiavelli had not been in earnest about it, but that the whole was a fine persiflage, an irony, and one cannot refrain from complimenting this irony-scenting public on its subtlety.
Machiavelli’s voice died away without effect.
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