partial intimation of the matter of my story. He takes me with
sympathy not only by reason of the dream he pursued and the humanity
of his politics, but by the mixture of his nature. His vices come
in, essential to my issue. He is dead and gone, all his immediate
correlations to party and faction have faded to insignificance,
leaving only on the one hand his broad method and conceptions, and
upon the other his intimate living personality, exposed down to its
salacious corners as the soul of no contemporary can ever be
exposed. Of those double strands it is I have to write, of the
subtle protesting perplexing play of instinctive passion and desire
against too abstract a dream of statesmanship. But things that
seemed to lie very far apart in Machiavelli's time have come near to
one another; it is no simple story of white passions struggling
against the red that I have to tell.

The state-making dream is a very old dream indeed in the world's
history. It plays too small a part in novels. Plato and Confucius
are but the highest of a great host of minds that have had a kindred
aspiration, have dreamt of a world of men better ordered, happier,
finer, securer. They imagined cities grown more powerful and
peoples made rich and multitudinous by their efforts, they thought
in terms of harbours and shining navies, great roads engineered
marvellously, jungles cleared and deserts conquered, the ending of
muddle and diseases and dirt and misery; the ending of confusions
that waste human possibilities; they thought of these things with
passion and desire as other men think of the soft lines and tender
beauty of women. Thousands of men there are to-day almost mastered
by this white passion of statecraft, and in nearly every one who
reads and thinks you could find, I suspect, some sort of answering
response. But in every one it presents itself extraordinarily