of a positive philosophy to statecraft. The success which attended the
violence and dissimulation of the Romans, as described by Livy, induced
him to inculcate the principles on which they acted. The scientific
method followed by Aristotle in the Politics encouraged him in the
adoption of a similar analysis; while the close parallel between ancient
Greece and mediaeval Italy was sufficient to create a conviction that
the wisdom of the old world would be precisely applicable to the
conditions of the new. These, however, are exculpations of the man
rather than justifications of his theory. The theory was false and
vicious. And the fact remains that the man, impregnated by the bad
morality of the period in which he lived, was incapable of ascending
above it to the truth, was impotent with all his acumen to read the
deepest lessons of past and present history, and in spite of his
acknowledged patriotism succeeded only in adding his conscious and
unconscious testimony to the corruption of the country that he loved.
The broad common-sense, the mental soundness, the humane instinct and
the sympathy with nature, which give fertility and wholeness to the
political philosophy of men like Burke, are absent in Machiavelli. In
spite of its vigor, his system implies an inversion of the ruling laws
of health in the body politic. In spite of its logical cogency, it is
inconclusive by reason of defective premises. Incomparable as an essay
in pathological anatomy, it throws no light upon the working of a normal
social organism, and has at no time been used with profit even by the
ambitious and unscrupulous.




CHAPTER VII.