desk.

That vision of the strengthened and perfectedstate is protagonist

in my story. But as I re-read "The Prince" andthought out the

manner of my now abandoned project, I came toperceive how that stir

and whirl of humanthought 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 athinking man,

himself not powerful, might do the work ofstate building, and that

was by seizing the imagination of a Prince. Directly these men

turned theirthoughts towards realisation, theirattitudes became-

what shall I call it?-secretarial. Machiavelli, it istrue, had

some littledoubts about the particular Prince he wanted, whether it

was Caesar Borgia of Giuliano or Lorenzo, but a Prince it had to be.

Before Isaw clearly the differences of our own time I searched my

mind for the modern equivalent of a Prince. At various times I

redrafted 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, Imyself 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'sabsolute

estate andresponsibility no more. In Machiavelli's time it was

indeed to an extreme degree one man's affair. But the days of the

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