ON THE POLITICAL WRITINGS OF MACHIAVELLI.

THE political writings of Machiavelli, distinguished for their condensed and spirited style, and for the intimate knowledge of mankind they display, have acquired a still more extended reputation through the contests to which they have given birth, and the vehemence with which the disputants have maintained their respective opinions. In the anatomy of society which Machiavelli has presented to his reader, he has with an undisturbed sang-froid displayed sentiments and principles, which, though familiar perhaps in insulation, had never before been collected into one group. The elevated and the virtuous were shocked at the depravity he developed (a depravity which proceeded from the bad institutions of the age, but which in the then existing state of philosophy passed for innate), and the hypocrites took a prompt and a sensitive alarm at the exposure; since by betraying their means, it threatened an eternal divorce from ends that for a long series of ages had been pursued in unsuspected security. The hostility thus excited was deep, clamorous, and persevering and this author has been censured, preached and written against by Catholics and Protestants, priests and philosophers, statesmen and moralists, till his name has become a by-word in literature, and is applied to whatever is tortuous in policy and abandoned in principle.*

To this torrent of reprobation and invective were opposed the literary merits of the author, the truth of his details, the caustic severity of his remarks, the justification which practical statesmen have endeavoured to find for their own abuses in his maxims, and, above all, the patriotism of the Florentines, and the honest pride they indulge in the memory of the sagacious historian and zealous servant of the expiring republic. Thus defences and apologies have multiplied with a fecundity proportioned to the virulence of the attack; and public opinion has as yet to decide upon the real character and tendency of the author and his writings. Of the several productions of Machiavelli, his "Prince" has attracted the most sweeping and indiscriminate censure, as a systematized code of irreligion, of impiety, and of tyranny; while on the other hand it has been defended and applauded as an able exposure of the arts of despotism, and as an useful lesson to the defenders of liberty, enabling them to oppose to their oppressors a more regulated and scientific resistance. This last opinion is almost as ancient as the work itself, having been adopted to silence the outcry of Cardinal Pole; and it has even been asserted, though upon inadequate grounds, that "the Prince" was originally presented to Clement the Seventh under the title of "the Tyrant.' The same likewise was

Cardinal Reginald Pole began the attack in his "Apologia ad Carolum V. Cæsarem." Catarino Polito gives Machiavelli a chapter in his treatise "De libris à Cristiano detestandis." Antonio Possevino published several treatises against him from materials supposed to be furnished by Innocent IX. The most remarkable trait in these productions is the ignorance of their author in citing the 2d and 3d books of the Prince" which consists but of one. Notwithstanding the multiplicity of such attacks, it was not till the year 1559 that Paul the Fourth placed the writings of Machiavelli on the Index; where they now figure, by a curious caprice of fortune, together with the Antimachiavelli of Voltaire and the King of Prussia, the last, I believe, of his opponents.

VOL. VII. NO. XXVII.

the opinion of Bacon, who returns Machiavelli thanks for his candid exposition of the vices and imperfections of statesmen. "Est quod gratias agamus Machiavello et hujusmodi scriptoribus, qui apertè et indissimulanter proferunt quod homines facere soleant, non quod debeant."

Another opinion, entertained by those who did not deem this naked exposure of the truth so meritorious as our Chancellor conceived it, is, that" the Prince" was composed expressly to deceive the Medici (who had recently overturned the liberties of Florence, and subjected Machiavelli himself to the ignominy of the torture), in order to hurry them into acts of ill-advised violence, which, being undertaken to strengthen their newly acquired throne, would the most effectually undermine its foundations.

Lastly, an idea altogether different has been broached, that the tendency of the book was to strengthen the hands of the Medici, and enable them to unite the petty states of Italy into one kingdom, and thus to release that ill-fated country from the misery and disgrace of foreign domination. In support of this notion, the last chapter of the work is cited, which, as it were the moral and envoy of the whole, treats of the deliverance of Italy from the grasp of the barbarians.

In human affairs, the simplest conjectures are ordinarily the most happy; and alembicated systems for explaining conduct, and reconciling contradictions of character, are rarely satisfactory. That the intention of Machiavelli was not to deceive, might have been collected from the abundance of good advice he gives, not only for the government of states, but also for promoting the private interests of the ruler. The great tendency of" the Prince" is to teach the means of consolidating and strengthening a newly acquired authority; and in almost every page he inculcates the necessity of maintaining a domestic army, and of not trusting to those mercenary bands which had betrayed and ruined nearly all the potentates of Italy. * It was most assuredly not for the purposes of deception that he taught the Medici to distrust those whom they had injured, "E chi crede che ne' personaggi grandi i beneficj nuovi facciano dimenticare le ingiurie vecchie, s'inganna +;" or that he advised them to confide rather in the people than the aristocracy, as being more easy to gain, and less personal in their desires. Į

Had it been the intention of Machiavelli to betray the Medici into tyrannous and extravagant conduct, in order to provoke a revolutionary reaction, he would not thus have put them on their guard against the most dangerous errors in government, a mercenary army, and a pampered aristocracy: nor can it be maintained that these passages were inserted as blinds to screen more covert attacks on the credulity of the tyrant. The quantity of good advice is far too great for the mere purposes of this necessary duplicity. Fortunately, however, there exists better than internal evidence for solving this problem, in a most valuable and curious letter § from the author himself to Francesco Vittori, in which he distinctly expresses his simplicity of intention towards the Medici, and his desire to obtain employment under them, if in the beginning it were only to " roll stones; for then," he says, "if I did

+ Ibid. cap. vii.

* Principe, cap. xii.
Ibid. cap. ix.
§ In the Barbarini MS. first published in the Milan edition of March 1813,

not gain them over to my side, I should have only myself to blame." To this end, he proposes to present them his book as evidence, that, during the fifteen years of his public service, he had neither been idle nor asleep.

The great point of intention being indisputably cleared, there remain but two questions for consideration;-the character of the means which Machiavelli offers to his expected patrons,-and the propriety of his conduct in attempting to strengthen that tyranny, against which his whole life had been an uninterrupted opposition.

That Machiavelli was not a man of loose and abandoned principles, must be evident, on the bare perusal of his works. Nearly sixty octavo pages have been filled by one of his admirers with sentiments of such pure morality and high-toned patriotism, extracted from his writings, as must exempt him from a charge of deliberate corruption: and, notwithstanding all that can justly be objected against his works, enough remains of political philosophy, to give them a value, so long as man shall live in society, and governments be subjected to domestic treason and external force. It was the misfortune of Machiavelli to have lived and taken an active part in affairs at an epoch of civilization, at which mankind had abandoned the simpler instinctive virtues, without having acquired that regulated and balanced action, which results from well understood self-interests, and sound political institutions. A religion, powerful in its abuses, and feeble in its influence on morals, had prepared the mind for the reception of the most false and dangerous axioms. A race of upstart military despots had overturned the republican governments which had parcelled and divided Italy; and the sinallness of their territories favouring personal rivality, and occasioning frequent changes of fortune, opened a wide door to the fiercer passions, and rendered a contempt of all faith, and the most atrocious criminality, the favourite engines of state policy: while the poniard and the drugged bowl were regarded as useful, and even necessary agents, in the attainment of personal security and political preponderance.

In the better part of his life, Machiavelli, engaged in the affairs of the Florentine republic, was the near witness of its unavailing struggle against subjection; and he sought in the historian of free and triumphant Rome for examples and axioms to guide his countrymen in the support of liberty and national independence. Political œconomy and the philosophy of legislation, which are but now becoming a popular subject of inquiry, had not then entered into the conception of statesmen. The notion that "true self-love and social are the same," and that the interests of all mankind are alike, formed no part of political speculations; nor indeed was any theoretical scheme of polity known, except those philosophical reveries, which, alike impractical and visionary, were read only to be forgotten in the business of life. It was therefore in the true spirit of the Baconian method that Machiavelli commenced his researches; and whether he commented on the history of Rome, or noted the more dreadful crimes of Italian despotism, he worked the problem of national prosperity with a deliberate calmness, analyzing the influence of conduct upon public events without reference to their moral character, treating religion merely in its influence on the state, and regarding the brightest attributes of morality, and the most debasing wickedness, only as they may be the moyens de parvenir, and

applicable to the exigencies of a given contingency. Thus, in treating of the turbulence of the Roman citizens, he considers only the balance of evils between external and internal weakness; and thus he praises Numa for the imposition he practised on the people, observing that no successful legislator had ever existed, who did not give his institutions the sanction of divine authority. In the thirteenth chapter of the second book of his discourses on Livy, he expressly declares his belief, that a prince who wishes to effect great successes, should in the first place learn to deceive; for though many have arisen from humble fortunes to sovereign rule, by mere fraud, none ever arrived at empire, by the unassisted power of open and ingenuous force.

In all these results it is evident that Machiavelli merely repeated the lessons of experience, and displayed things as they actually were. The turn of his intellect and the bent of his character are obviously practical; and himself a statesman, he shares the common error of his class, respecting political morality. The routine of office has in all ages been unfavourable to enlarged and philosophical views. The personal conviction it affords of the facilities of corruption, and of the small quantity of talent and energy necessary to keep the state machine in movement, when the impetus is once given, necessarily engenders low and erroneous notions of expediency and intrigue: and those who have best known the interior of cabinets, have been the most earnest in recommending temporising expediency, and in denying honesty and philosophy. The great combinations which operate the rise and fall of nations, are best observed from a distance; and those who are involved in the details of affairs, cannot embrace the whole series of consequences which change national character and dig the graves of empires. Those, therefore, whom birth or accident places at the head of governments, become readily vacillating in principle, and feeble and corrupt in practice. A transitory success of false and criminal measures disguises the inherent and indefeasible connexion of cause and effect, and leads to an hasty conclusion, that accident prevails over design, and that poetical justice is foreign to the actual government of a world of realities.

By religion, by education, and by example, Machiavelli was estranged from that abstracted and soaring virtue, which forms to itself an archetypal perfection, with the principles of which there is no admissible compromise, and from the practice of which there is no pardonable deviation. To the sentiment of morality, in common with the other statesmen of his day, he seems to have been a stranger; and the terrible example of the successes of the Borgia family, whose crimes he so frequently quotes with complacency, were enough indeed to shake the constancy of credulity itself. In the condition in which Italy then stood, a knowledge of what was doing and had been done, was necessary, at least as a piece of defensive armour, in the battle for independence; and Machiavelli's anatomy of the abuses of the times was the more necessary, because information was less diffused than at present, and there was no diurnal press to drag to light the motives and actions of conflicting tyrants.

To try the opinions of such a writer by the more enlightened philosophy of our own times, would be neither candid nor useful; yet it may be doubted whether those who have conducted British affairs from

the period of the breach with America, have not been guided, in some periods of their rule, by maxims as false and antisocial as any which are sprinkled through the pages of "the Prince :" and most assuredly there is nothing in the whole round of Machiavelism, which can compete with the deliberate falsehood, the blasphemous hypocrisy, and coldblooded sacrifice of humanity to the selfish passions of the right-lined few, which have rendered the Holy Alliance a marked epoch in the history of human degradation and suffering.

The portraiture which Machiavelli has drawn of kingly government, if it be not amiable, is at least veracious; and, if it be compared with contemporary history, it may even be censured as feeble. Such, however, as it is, it is no longer dangerous. The same means, by which tyrant overthrew tyrant, are unavailing when opposed to the illumination and activity of civilized Europeans. It is impossible to contemplate the march of passing events without being convinced, that the straight line is the shortest possible in politics as in mathematics; and that the crimes of governments are the sure sources of their heaviest miscarriages.

With respect to the subserviency of Machiavelli to the Medici, and the means he adopted for ingratiating himself with the betrayers of his country, by offering them the fruits of his political experience, there can scarcely exist two opinions; but the degree of blame with which his falling off may be visited, must be measured by each individual according to his own purity, attempered by that compassion which his sympathy for human frailty may be capable of exciting. There is a period in the life of man at which the mind grows fatigued with an unavailing contest against corruption; and there are degrees of oppression, against which even fortitude itself may be unable to contend. The combination of both these circumstances seems to have operated in changing the politics of this unfortunate man, in the latter days of his life. The picture which he himself gives of his own miserable condition, can scarcely be perused without a tear. Poor, neglected, and abandoned; condemned to seek a temporary solace in the lowest company, * and to repose his wearied intellects by retreating from Livy and Tacitus to the conversation of butchers and millers; harassed alike by remembrances of the past and fears for the future, his desire to seek from the protection of the Medici, by that time the uncontrollable masters of the republic, bread and security for the little remnant of his existence, if not exempt from blame, is still a pardonable weakness. Let him who is without political offence throw the first stone; but, ere he reprobates the want of a stoical indifference in Machiavelli, let him heap a double measure of obloquy on the successful traitors, who, in overturning the independence of Florence, wreaked their unmanly vengeance on the fortunes and person of the unsuccessful patriot.

That Machiavelli had conceived the project of directing the enor

Mangiato che ho ritorno nel osteria. Quì è l'oste per l'ordinario un beccajo, un mugnajo, due fornacciai. Con questi io m' ingoglioffo per tutto dì, giocando a cricca, a trictrac, e dove nascono mille contese e mille dispetti de' parole ingiuriose ; ed il più delle volte si combatte un quatrino, e siamo sentiti non di manco gridare da San Casciano. Così rinvolto in questa viltà, traggo il cervello di muffa, e sfogo la malignità de questa mia sorte; sendo contento mi calpesti per quella via, per Lettera a F. Vittori. vedere se la sene vergogna.