has immediately to cope with a multitude of independent rulers, too
numerous to extinguish and too proud to conciliate.

Machiavelli now proceeds to discuss the best method of subjugating free
cities which have been acquired by a prince. There are three ways of
doing it, he says. 'The first is to destroy them utterly; the second, to
rule them in your own person; the third, to leave them their
constitution under the conduct of an oligarchy chosen by yourself, and
to be content with tribute. But, to speak the truth, the only safe way
is to ruin them.' This sounds very much like the advice which an old
spider might give to a young one: When you have caught a big fly, suck
him at once; suck out at any rate so much of his blood as may make him
powerless to break your web, and feed on him afterwards at leisure. Then
he goes on to give his reasons. 'He who becomes the master of a city
used to liberty, and does not destroy it, should be prepared to be
undone by it himself, because that name of Liberty, those ancient usages
of Freedom, which no length of years and no benefits can extinguish in
the nation's mind, which cannot be uprooted by any forethought or by any
pains, unless the citizens themselves be broken or dispersed, will
always be a rallying-point for revolution when an opportunity occurs.'
This terrific moral--through which, let it be said in justice to
Machiavelli, the enthusiasm of a patriot transpires--is pointed by the
example of Pisa. Pisa, held for a century beneath the heel of
Florence--her ports shut up, her fields abandoned to marsh fever, her
civic life extinguished, her arts and sciences crushed out--had yet not
been utterly ruined in the true sense of depopulation or dismemberment.
Therefore when Charles VIII. in 1494 entered Pisa, and Orlandi, the
orator, caught him by the royal mantle, and besought him to restore her
liberty, that word, the only word the crowd could catch in his petition,
inflamed a nation: the lions and lilies of Florence were erased from the