Although the light of almost four centuries has been focused on The Prince, its problems are still debatable and interesting, because they are the eternal problems between the ruled and their rulers. Such as they are, its ethics are those of Machiavelli's contemporaries; yet they cannot be said to be out of date so long as the governments of Europe rely on material rather than on moral forces. Its historical incidents and personages become interesting by reason of the uses which Machiavelli makes of them to

Of all Machiavelli's works The Prince is undoubtedly the greatest; and a new English edition of it is likely to be welcome to all those who have not the advantage of reading it in the classical Italian original. For a true appreciation of Machiavelli, impossible in a brief Preface, I must refer the English reader to Macaulay's Essay on the Italian historian and statesman. In it he will see how our Author's ideas and work were wrongfully and wilfully misinterpreted by the ver y men who, while profiting by h

The remaining years of Machiavelli's official career were filled with events arising out of the League of Cambrai, made in 1508 between the three great European powers already mentioned and the pope, with the object of crushing the Venetian Republic. This result was attained in the battle of Vaila, when Venice lost in one day all that she had won in eight hundred years. Florence had a difficult part to play during these events, complicated as they were by the feud which broke out between the pope and the Fr