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THE PURPOSE OF 'THE PRINCE.' 25
immorality and ambition, the religious sense was decaying, and
morality together with it was lost. The full, vigorous, and restless
life, which fermented within the narrow bounds of each state,
was exhausting the country; the perpetual necessity of watching
themselves or their neighbours produced among the political
rings that governed Italy a sense of mutual distrust ; they were
very zealous for their parochial fatherland • they were prepared
to go all lengths in its defence ; but they dared not arm their
own citizens, who might be made the instrument of conspiracy.
Under these circumstances it was natural that political success
should depend mainly upon the exercise of superior shrewdness.
Each 'prince,' whose power had no foundation in
authority, was forced to rely upon himself, his own ready
resource and acuteness; the exigencies of his position
blinded him, more or less in different cases, to the character
of the means he employed, provided only that the end was
gained. 'Tout ce que la politique commande, la justice l'autorise'
was a maxim put into practice long before it was formulated;
and though for a long time there was no conscious
separation of the spheres of politics and common life, nor any
formal determination of the duties of the politician vis-d-vis of
the individual in society, yet the moral aspect of every state
question came to be dropped by a tacit understanding, till, as
Machiavelli says, ' della fede non si tiene oggi conto.'
The Italians were not ignorant of the evils which were caused
by their own disunion, but the majority felt strongly the hopelessness
of any attempt to cope with them. Guicciardini, a
thoroughly practical man, whose writings form the best comment
upon Machiavelli, regarded any scheme for the unification
of Italy as the idle vision of a dream; indeed he was almost
inclined to think it undesirable in itself, and to regard the
stimulating influence of a number of independent states as a
compensation for the weakness of a divided nation. In any
case he was convinced that Italy could not cut herself adrift
from the past and, making a _tabula rasa' of her old institutions,
take a fresh start at a given moment ; and hence he
rejected the idea of a great and general fatherland for all
Italians, the notion of which had been gradually permeating the
intellectual atmosphere.
But this idea, though in a dim, half-conscious way, was