Conduct of Foreign Policy
23
Men have been impelled by Necessity to achieve, with their hands and tongue, that excellence whereunto we see them by their labours to have been brought; and it behoves men to consider well the quality of the times always, for often the good or the evil that befalls is in no other wise to be explained than by the manner of the encounter of their proceedings with the times, and by their proceeding conformably to them, or not conformably. Fortuna is fickle and mysterious. But, where she cannot be humoured, by weaving her webs, and by not breaking them,[1] then, like a jade, she may by strength and decisiveness be mastered. Be not over-scrupulous, with fine sensibility of conscience, when conditions are adverse, and when to lose time is to miss success. Do not resolve on the end until you are assured it is that which reason and interest—cool judgement——enjoin. But, when you have so resolved, command the means. Not without cause the voice of the people, in the things of their knowledge, is likened to the voice of God[2]; yet the ills of a people may have to be cured by the Prince by remedies sharp and strong and seemingly cruel. In my work, The Prince, intended for a special set of circumstances, and confirmed, amplified, and proportioned by my Discourses and other of my writings in many places—in that, my little gift to The Magnificent Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, with what motive fashioned men after me may inquire and not agree—I have said what will, I do not doubt, be charged against me as preaching sin, when I was merely warning my fellow-men—’fellow-Christians’ I will not say—against committing mistakes. And yet all that I have meant to enjoin on men, and on my own countrymen first, for their good, is hidden away in these words I wrote to my friend, Francesco Vettori,[3] Ambassador at Rome: ‘When
- ↑ Discorsi, ii. 29; Il Principe, 25.
- ↑ Discorsi, i. 58.
- ↑ For Machiavelli’s correspondence with Vettori, see Villari, Machiavelli, iii. 191–216. ‘In the correspondence of Guicciardini and his other contemporaries, we only descry the writer’s real mind as though through the folds of a thick veil; for all these men merely described and analysed that which they did, never that which they felt. Machiavelli showed a fuller self-consciousness, a livelier need of opening his soul; therefore—rarely as he spoke of himself—his letters afford us the first really clear manifestation
