through which Italy was then passing, and in all of which the singleness of purpose with which he continued to advance his native Florence, is clearly manifested.  It was during his retirement upon his little estate at San Casciano that Machiavelli wrote The Prince, the most famous of all his writings, and here also he had begun a much more extensive work, his Discourses on the Decades of Livy, which continued to occupy him for several years.  These Discourses, which do not form a continuous commentary on Livy, give Machiavelli an opportunity to express his own views on the government of the state, a task for which his long and varied political experience, and an assiduous study of the ancients rendered him eminently qualified.  The Discourses and The Prince, written at the same time, supplement each other and are really one work.  Indeed, the treatise, The Art of War, though not written till 1520 should be mentioned here because of its intimate connection with these two treatises, it being, in fact, a further development of some of the thoughts expressed in the Discorsi. The Prince, a short work, divided into twenty-six books, is the best known of all Machiavelli’s writings.  Herein he expresses in his own masterly way his views on the founding of a new state, taking for his type and model Caesar Borgia, although the latter had failed in his schemes for the consolidation of his power in the Romagna.  The principles here laid down were the natural outgrowth of the confused political conditions of his time.  And as in the Principe, as its name indicates, Machiavelli is concerned chiefly with the government of a Prince, so the Discorsi treat principally of the Republic, and here Machiavelli’s model republic was the Roman commonwealth, the most successful and most enduring example of popular government.  Free Rome is the embodiment of his political idea of the state.  Much that Machiavelli says in this treatise is as true to-day and holds as good as the day it was written.  And to us there is much that is of especial importance.  To select a chapter almost at random, let us take Book I., Chap.  XV.:  “Public affairs are easily managed in a city where the body of the people is not corrupt; and where equality exists, there no principality can be established; nor can a republic be established where there is no equality.”

No man has been more harshly judged than Machiavelli, especially in the two centuries following his death.  But he has since found many able champions and the tide has turned. The Prince has been termed a manual for tyrants, the effect of which has been most pernicious.  But were Machiavelli’s doctrines really new?  Did he discover them?  He merely had the candor and courage to write down what everybody was thinking and what everybody knew.  He merely gives us the impressions he had received from a long and intimate intercourse with princes and the affairs of state.  It was Lord Bacon, I believe,