age of crafty counsel. King James, in his turn, though he resented Sir Henry Wotton's famous pleasantry, piqued himself on a statecraft that was certainly not scrupulous, and he handed on the worst part of the Machiavellian tradition to his Stuart successors. In them it was reinforced by the contemporary influence of the Court of France, the political morals of which under the Bourbons were no improvement on those under the Valois. Cardinal Richelieu regarded the maxims of Machiavelli as 'indispensable,' and he certainly acted on them. Of his successor Mazarin, another churchman, it was said that as a statesman he had one fault-that he was always a rogue.* It was at his suggestion that Gabriel Naudé wrote his Considérations,' t of which Voltaire said that 'the maxims of the Parisian make those of the Florentine seem mild,' but which was none the less so highly thought of that an enlarged edition was published so late as 1752.

But, in the end, it was Louis XIV who, by the magnificence of his pose and the prestige of his conquests, gave a general vogue to the idea that the monarch, as the vicegerent of God, stands above the moral law. Henceforward every princeling in Europe applied to his own case the Grand Monarque's formula 'L'État c'est moi,' with all that this was held to involve. It involved, among other things, the confounding of personal ambition with the reason of State. Machiavelli had praised the instinct of acquisition as laudable in itself; the 17th century began to conceive aggrandisement as not only the right but the duty of princes, since the weaker are at the mercy of the stronger, and the only frontiers of a State are those necessary to its own conservation.' The principle which was to swell into the 'Weltmacht oder Untergang' of the Pan-Germans was already articulate-the principle that a State when it

* Don Luis de Haro, quoted in the Anti-Machiavel,' ed. 1740, p. 119. + 'Considérations sur les Coups d'Etat.' The original edition (Paris, 1639) consisted of only twelve copies. It was reprinted at Rome in 1714. The dedication was to Cardinal De Bagni, a papal diplomatist, whose servant and librarian Naudé was. Naudé advocates political assassination as a justifiable coup d'état, and he is not afraid' to praise the Massacre of St Bartholomew as a master-stroke.

Céleste, 'Louis Machon, apologiste de Machiavel.' Quoted by Sorel, op. cit., i, p. 20.

6

ceases to expand begins to perish. The old political conception of unity and ordered interdependence, never effectively realised, had disappeared in the dreadful anarchy of the Thirty Years' War; and it was only a thinker here and there who, like Leibnitz, still valued as an ideal the legal fiction of the Holy Roman Empire. The Continent of Europe had, like the Italy of the 15th century, broken up into warring political groups, whose only hope of stability depended upon the balance of power among them. The analogy was, indeed, recognised; and the champions of the rival faiths of Christendom modelled their conduct on the example of atheistical' Italy. As to the general scope of their policy, that already foreshadowed the 18th century. Frederick William, the great Elector of Brandenburg, enlarged piously in his Political Testament' on 'the true virtues of a righteous ruler'; but in a sort of codicil to this testament he pointed out that the House of Austria was tottering to its fall, set out his own claims to the Duchy of Silesia, and developed in great detail a plan for seizing it by force the moment the death of the Emperor should be announced.* Beneath the mask of the 17th-century piety we already recognise the features of 18th-century diplomacy-naked aggression veiled by genealogical pedantry, the struggle for the balance of power, the assertion of the raison d'état as the plea for all crimes.'†

In the vocabulary of the 18th century, 'philosophy' took the place of 'religion,' 'reason' that of faith,' and 'virtue' that of righteousness.' But, so far as political morals were concerned, the effect was much the same. Diplomacy, adjusting its language to the new fashion, merely invented a fresh jargon to disguise a realism offensive to the new canons of good taste; its exquisite politeness was but the reflexion of the elaborate manners of a society in which the slightest affront meant a challenge; and in the universal game of deception, of which the rules were perfectly understood, nobody was really deceived. The social prestige of sovereigns was exactly proportioned to their power; and power was

*Ranke, 'Preussische Geschichte,' ed. 1878, i, ii, p. 518.

Temperley, Frederick the Great and Kaiser Joseph. An episode of War and Diplomacy in the 18th century,' 1915.

calculated in terms of the taxable and conscribable 'souls' at their disposal. States were in fact estates, subject to all the rules of succession of private property; and sovereigns were great landlords (Landesherren, as the Germans still say), who strove to extend and round off their properties by judicious marriages, by exchanges, by buying reversions, and if need be by force.

The development of this unblushing Realpolitik had not taken place without protest. Machiavelli himself, after being patronised while alive by several Popes, was condemned when dead by another; and the 17th century, if it produced apologists, produced also indignant attacks upon him. The labours of diplomatists, moreover, had gradually evolved a mass of principles and precedents governing the intercourse of States, which jurists were busy building up into a system of public law; and amiable theorists, like the Abbé de St Pierre, saw in this the germ of a new Christian Republic which should realise at last the dream of perpetual peace. Clearly a political conscience was at work; and when, in 1740, there was published at The Hague, under the ægis of Voltaire, a drastic criticism of Machiavelli's 'Prince' and of the whole principle which it represented, by a writer whose exalted rank was thinly disguised under the veil of anonymity, this was hailed as the dayspring of a new and nobler age. 'We congratulate our century,' wrote

the editor of a French edition of Machiavelli's works published two years later,' on seeing at last a system so pernicious, and so detestable, refuted in a fashion so thorough, so well reasoned, and so superior, that there is every reason to presume that it is about to fall into all the contempt and all the execration which it deserves.'t The anonymous author of the Anti-Machiavel' was Frederick the Great.

Of this essay in criticism Carlyle says that 'treatise

Anti-Machiavel ou Essai de critique sur le Prince de Machiavel. Publié par M. de Voltaire.' La Haye, 1740. In this edition Frederick's text was much altered by Voltaire. The publisher, Jean van Duren, almost imme diately issued another edition, with both Voltaire's version and Frederick's original, under the title' Anti-Machiavel ou Examen du Prince,' etc.

+ 'Oeuvres de Machiavel, nouvelle édition, augmentée de l'AntiMachiavel et d'autres pièces.' La Haye, 1743, 6 tom. 12mo. Only extracts from the Anti-Machiavel are given in this.

fallen more extinct to existing mankind it would not be easy to name.' This contemptuous estimate is not deserved, for the 'Anti-Machiavel' is far more than a mere student's exercise in the application of abstract moralities. Though the whole argument rings the changes on the theme that honesty is the best policy even for princes, its youthful idealism is tempered by a keen sense of realities, and often there is revealed in it already the Frederick of the future. Princes,' he says, 'who look upon their people as the body of which they themselves are the soul, will be sparing of the blood of their subjects'; and 'war is an extreme resource which ought never to be used except in desperate cases.' But a prince's army is, none the less, his residence, his interest, his duty, his glory'; and he agrees with Machiavelli that he ought to lead it in person.

'I admit (he says) that there are unhappy circumstances in which a prince has no choice but to break his treaties and alliances; but he ought to quit them like an honest man, by giving timely warning to his allies, and above all he should never go to this extreme without being forced to do so by consideration for his people's good or by dire necessity.'* The later Frederick peeps through more evidently in his remarks on the usefulness of treaties. It is a fact, he says, that treaties are seldom carried out in full and often broken, but they are none the less useful, if only in ensuring for a time the neutrality of a possible enemy. As for the maxim that princes are under no obligation to keep their word, 'it is very bad policy on their part to be cheats and to dupe the world. They will only dupe it once, and lose thereby the confidence of all the princes.' 'A prince,' he said, 'is like a man playing cards with honest men and sharpers; in order not to be swindled he must know how he is being cheated, without himself having to cheat.' +

The completeness with which Frederick violated every one of the moral maxims of the Anti-Machiavel' the moment he was in a position to put them in practice suggests that this display of dove-like innocence was but a serpentine device for putting the world off its guard; and this suspicion is strengthened by the fact that the *Ed. 1740, p. 120.

† Ibid., p. 65.

Ibid.,

p. 119.

publication of the book at The Hague was announced in Berlin just eight days before its author invaded Silesia without warning. However this may be, the Frederick whom at the present time it is important to study is not the critic of Machiavelli but the aptest of his pupils, as revealed in his acts, in his correspondence, and in his own later apologies for his methods. This study is important because the vast prestige of his success not only strengthened for a time in all Europe an evil tradition in politics, but established it so strongly in the counsels of Prussia, that it has survived the influences that elsewhere have tended to weaken if not to destroy it, and has thus become the inspiration, both in their aims and in their methods, of those Powers with whom the idealism of the rest of the world is waging a war of life and death. It is for this reason that, at this supreme crisis, a debt of gratitude is owing to the two eminent French scholars whose labours have made more accessible the material for the critical understanding of the political methods of Frederick the Great.

Their books differ greatly in scope and method. M. Waddington's monumental work, of which the fifth volume has now appeared, is a brilliant study of the Seven Years' War, based on a mass of fresh materials gathered from the archives. It is largely concerned with Frederick's campaigns, which are described in great detail yet with a masterly breadth of treatment; but the author has not overlooked the characteristic of Frederick's statecraft, which has remained that of Prussia ever since, namely, what Commandant Weil describes as 'the combined and often parallel action of more or less secret diplomatic negotiations and military operations.'

Commandant Weil's Morale politique du Grand Frédéric' is a reprint, with an introduction and running comments, of the bulk of the first two of the thirtyfive published volumes of Frederick's political correspondence. It has a more limited object than that of M. Waddington, and it covers an even shorter period, namely, from Frederick's accession to the throne on

'Nouvelles privilégiées de Berlin.' No. lxx. Jeudi, 8 Décembre, 1740. A la Haye chez Jean van Duren est imprimé Examen du Prince de Machiavel avec des Notes historiques et politiques, in octavo.' Frederick crossed the frontier of Silesia on the 16th.