They have passed into the world of the ideal, and every humbug takes his freedoms with their names.But Machiavelli, more recent and less popular, is still all human and earthly, a fallen brother--and at the same time that nobly dressed and nobly dreaming writer at the desk.
That vision of the strengthened and perfected state is protagonist in my story.But as I re-read "The Prince" and thought out the manner of my now abandoned project, I came to perceive how that stir and whirl of human thought one calls by way of embodiment the French Revolution, has altered absolutely the approach to such a question.
Machiavelli, like Plato and Pythagoras and Confucius two hundred odd decades before him, saw only one method by which a thinking man, himself not powerful, might do the work of state building, and that was by seizing the imagination of a Prince.Directly these men turned their thoughts towards realisation, their attitudes became--what shall I call it?--secretarial.Machiavelli, it is true, had some little doubts about the particular Prince he wanted, whether it was Caesar Borgia of Giuliano or Lorenzo, but a Prince it had to be.
Before I saw clearly the differences of our own time I searched my mind for the modern equivalent of a Prince.At various times Iredrafted a parallel dedication to the Prince of Wales, to the Emperor William, to Mr.Evesham, to a certain newspaper proprietor who was once my schoolfellow at City Merchants', to Mr.J.D.
Rockefeller--all of them men in their several ways and circumstances and possibilities, princely.Yet in every case my pen bent of its own accord towards irony because--because, although at first I did not realise it, I myself am just as free to be a prince.The appeal was unfair.The old sort of Prince, the old little principality has vanished from the world.The commonweal is one man's absolute estate and responsibility no more.In Machiavelli's time it was indeed to an extreme degree one man's affair.But the days of the Prince who planned and directed and was the source and centre of all power are ended.We are in a condition of affairs infinitely more complex, in which every prince and statesman is something of a servant and every intelligent human being something of a Prince.No magnificent pensive Lorenzos remain any more in this world for secretarial hopes.
In a sense it is wonderful how power has vanished, in a sense wonderful how it has increased.I sit here, an unarmed discredited man, at a small writing-table in a little defenceless dwelling among the vines, and no human being can stop my pen except by the deliberate self-immolation of murdering me, nor destroy its fruits except by theft and crime.No King, no council, can seize and torture me; no Church, no nation silence me.Such powers of ruthless and complete suppression have vanished.But that is not because power has diminished, but because it has increased and become multitudinous, because it has dispersed itself and specialised.It is no longer a negative power we have, but positive; we cannot prevent, but we can do.This age, far beyond all previous ages, is full of powerful men, men who might, if they had the will for it, achieve stupendous things.
The things that might be done to-day! The things indeed that are being done! It is the latter that give one so vast a sense of the former.When I think of the progress of physical and mechanical science, of medicine and sanitation during the last century, when Imeasure the increase in general education and average efficiency, the power now available for human service, the merely physical increment, and compare it with anything that has ever been at man's disposal before, and when I think of what a little straggling, incidental, undisciplined and uncoordinated minority of inventors, experimenters, educators, writers and organisers has achieved this development of human possibilities, achieved it in spite of the disregard and aimlessness of the huge majority, and the passionate resistance of the active dull, my imagination grows giddy with dazzling intimations of the human splendours the justly organised state may yet attain.I glimpse for a bewildering instant the heights that may be scaled, the splendid enterprises made possible.
