THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

positive; we ca

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 I

measure 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.

But the appeal goes out now in other forms, in a book that catches

at thousands of readers for the eye of a Prince diffused. It is the

old appeal indeed for the unification of human effort, the ending of

confusions, but instead of the Machiavellian deference to a

flattered lord, a man cries out of his heart to the unseen

fellowship about him. The last written dedication of all those I

burnt last night, was to no single man, but to the socially

constructive passion-in any man…

There is, moreover, a second great difference in kind between my

world and Machiavelli's. We are discovering women. It is as if

they had come across a vast interval since his time, into the very

chamber of the statesman.

2

In Machiavelli's outlook the interest of womanhood was in a region

of life almost infinitely remote from his statecraft. They were the

vehicle of children, but only Imperial Rome and the new world of to-

day have ever had an inkling of the significance that might give

them in the state. They did their work, he thought, as the ploughed

earth bears its crops. Apart from their function of fertility they

gave a humorous twist to life, stimulated worthy men to toil, and

wasted the hours of Princes. He left the thought of women outside

with his other dusty things when he went into his study to write,

dismissed them from his mind. But our modern world is burthened

with its sense of the immense, now half articulate, significance of

women. They stand now, as it were, close beside the silver

candlesticks, speaking as Machiavelli writes, until he stays his pen

and turns to discuss his writing with them.

It is this gradual discovery of sex as a thing collectively

portentous that I have to mingle with my statecraft if my picture is

to be true which has turned me at length from a treatise to the

telling of my own story. In my life I have paralleled very closely

the slow realisations that are going on in the world about me. I

began life ignoring women, they came to me at first perplexing and

dishonouring; only very slowly and very late in my life and after

misadventure, did I gauge the power and beauty of the love of man

and woman and learnt how it must needs frame a justifiable vision of

the ordered world. Love has brought me to disaster, because my

career had been pla

But Machiavelli, it seems to me, when he went into his study, left

not only the earth of life outside but its unsuspected soul.

3

Like Machiavelli at San Casciano, if I may take this analogy one

step further, I too am an exile. Office and leading are closed to

me. The political career that promised so much for me is shattered

and ended for ever.

I look out from this vine-wreathed veranda under the branches of a

stone pine; I see wide and far across a purple valley whose sides

are terraced and set with houses of pine and ivory, the Gulf of

Liguria gleaming sapphire blue, and cloud-like baseless mountains

hanging in the sky, and I think of lank and coaly steamships heaving

on the grey rollers of the English Cha

with rain, I recall as if I were back there the busy exit from

Charing Cross, the cross and the money-changers' offices, the

splendid grime of giant London and the crowds going perpetually to

and fro, the lights by night and the urgency and eventfulness of

that great rain-swept heart of the modern world.

It is difficult to think we have left that-for many years if not

for ever. In thought I walk once more in Palace Yard and hear the

clink and clatter of hansoms and the quick quiet whirr of motors; I

go in vivid recent memories through the stir in the lobbies, I sit

again at eventful di

below the House-di

think of huge clubs swarming and excited by the bulletins of that

electoral battle that was for me the opening opportunity. I see the

stencilled names and numbers go up on the green baize, constituency

after constituency, amidst murmurs or loud shouting…

It is over for me now and vanished. That opportunity will come no

more. Very probably you have heard already some crude inaccurate

version of our story and why I did not take office, and have formed