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DIALOGUE IN HELL BETWEEN MACHIAVELLI & MONTESQUIEU - MAURICE JOLY
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The following is translated by Google Language Tools from the French original at Project Gutenberg:

http://www.google.com/language_tools

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13187/13187-h/13187-h.htm

A readers acquaintance with French is of course useful in approaching the resulting document. As one might expect, idiomatic irregularities fall into essentially two classes: syntactic & lexical. The majority of the former can be readily ignored, with the possible exception of the often superfluous definite article "the". The most ubiquitous example of the latter is the rendering of "societe" as "company". Considering the context of this particular document, a judicious set of global text changes & some minimal massaging (with recourse to a French dictionary) could potentially with comparatively little effort transform the following unaltered rendition from nearly perfect to perfect. I leave that as a separate project.

Berkeley, 2007oct15

DIALOGUE WITH THE HELLS BETWEEN MACHIAVEL AND MONTESQUIEU

OR

The POLICY OF MACHIAVEL AT the XIXe CENTURY,

BY A CONTEMPORARY.

"Soon one would see calms dreadful, during whom all would meet against the power violatrice of the laws."

"When Sylla wanted to return freedom to Rome, it could not any more receive it"

(MONTESQUIEU, Esp. of the Laws.)

BRUSSELS, PRINTING WORKS OF A. MERTENS AND WIRE, STREET OF THE STAIRCASE, 22

1864

SIMPLE WARNING.

This book refers which can apply to all the governments, but it has a more precise goal: it alas personifies in particular a political system which did not vary only one day in its applications, since the harmful date and already too remote! of its establishment.

It is here neither about one makes out, nor of a lampoon; the direction of the modern people is organized too much to accept violent truths on the contemporary policy. The supernatural duration of certain successes is made besides to corrupt honesty itself; but the public conscience still saw and the sky will finish well some day by mixing with the part which is played against him.

One judges better certain facts and certain principles when one sees them apart from the framework where they are usually driven under our eyes; the change of the point of optics terrifies sometimes the glance!

Here, all is appeared as a fiction; it would be superfluous to give of it, by anticipation, the key. If this book has a range, if it contains a teaching, it is necessary that the reader understands it and not that it is commented on to him. This reading, moreover, will not miss enough sharp distractions; it is necessary to proceed to it slowly however, as it is appropriate for the writings which are not frivolous things.

One will not ask which is the hand which traced these pages: a work as this one is to some extent impersonal. It answers a call of the conscience; everyone conceived, it is carried out, the author is erased, because he is only the writer of a thought which is in the direction general, he is only one more or less obscure accomplice of the coalition of the good.

GENEVA, on October 15, 1864.

1st PART.

FIRST DIALOGUE.

MACHIAVEL.

On the edges of this deserted beach, one said to me that I would meet the shade of large Montesquieu. Is this itself which is in front of me?

MONTESQUIEU.

The name of Large does not belong here to anybody, . Machiavel! But I am that which you seek.

MACHIAVEL.

Among the famous characters whose shades populate the stay of darkness, it is not that I more wished to meet than Montesquieu. Driven back in these unknown spaces by the migration of the hearts, I randomly return graces which puts to me finally in the presence of the author of the Spirit of the laws.

MONTESQUIEU.

The former Secretary of State of the Republic florentine did not still forget the language of the courses. But what can have to exchange those which crossed these dark shores, if they are not anguishes and regrets?

MACHIAVEL.

Is this the philosopher, is this the statesman which speaks thus? What imports death for those which lived by the thought, since the thought does not die? I do not know, as for me, of condition more tolerable than that which is done to us here until the day of the last judgement. To be delivered care and concern of the material life, to live in the field of the pure reason, to be able to discuss with the great men who filled the universe of the noise of their name; to follow by far the revolutions of the States, the fall and the transformation of the empires, to meditate on their new constitutions, the changes brought in manners and the ideas of the people of Europe, on progress of their civilization, in the policy, arts, industry, as the sphere of the philosophical ideas, what a theatre for the thought! That matters of astonishment! that new points of view! That amazing revelations! That wonders, if it is necessary to believe of them the shades which go down here! Death is for us as a major retirement where we complete to collect the lessons of the history and the titles of humanity. Nothing itself could not break all the bonds which attach us to the ground, because the posterity still discusses those which, like you, printed great movements with the human spirit. Your political principles reign, per hour that it is, on about half of Europe; and if somebody can be freed from fear while carrying out it sinks passage which leads to the hell or the sky, which can it better than that which is presented with so pure claims to fame in front of eternal justice?

MONTESQUIEU.

You do not speak about you, Machiavel; it too much is modesty, when one leaves after oneself the immense famous one of the author of the Treaty of the Prince.

MACHIAVEL. I believe to include/understand the irony which hides under your words. The large French publicity agent would it thus judge me as the crowd which knows to ego only my name and a prejudged blind man? This book made me a fatal fame, I know it: it returned to me responsible for all tyrannies; it attracted me the curse of the people which personified in me them hatred for the despotism; it poisoned my last days, and the reprobation of the posterity seems to have followed me up to now. What do I have however makes? During fifteen years I served my fatherland which was a Republic; I conspired for his independence, and I defended it without slackening against Louis XII, the Spaniards, Jules II, Borgia itself which, without me, had choked it. I protected it from the bloody intrigues which crossed in all the directions around it, combatant by the diplomacy as another had fought by the sword; treating, trader, tying or breaking wire according to the interests of the Republic, which was then crushed between the great powers, and that the war tossed like a wherry. And it was not a government oppressor or autocratic which we supported in Florence; they was popular institutions. Was I those which one saw changing with fortune? The torturers of M.dicis knew to find me after the fall of Soderini. Raised with freedom, I succumbed with it; I lived in the proscription without the glance of a prince condescending to turn to me. I am poor and forgotten death. Here is my life, and here are the crimes which were worth me the ingratitude of my fatherland, the hatred of the posterity. The sky, perhaps, will be righter towards me.

MONTESQUIEU.

I knew all that, Machiavel, and for this reason I never could include/understand how the Florentin patriot, how the servant of a Republic had been made the founder of this dark school which gave you for disciples all the crowned heads, but which is specific to justify the greatest fixed prices of tyranny.

MACHIAVEL.

And if I said to you that this book was only one imagination of diplomat; that it was not intended for the impression; that it received a publicity to which the author remained foreign; that it was conceived under the influence of ideas which were then common to all the Italian principalities avid to increase at the expense one of the other, and directed by an astute policy in which most perfidious was famous most skilfulà

MONTESQUIEU.

Is this your thought really there? Since you speak to me with this frankness, I then to acknowledge you that it was mine, and that I divided in this respect the opinion of several of those which knew your life and had read your works attentively. Yes, yes, Machiavel, and this consent honours you, you then did not say what you think, or you said it only under the empire of personal feelings which disturbed for one moment your highreason.

MACHIAVEL.

It is what misleads you, Montesquieu, with the example of those which judged some like you. My only crime was to say the truth to the people as with the kings; not the moral truth, but the political truth; not the truth such as it should be, but such as it is, such as it will be always. It is not me which am the founder of the doctrines which one allots paternity to me; it is the human heart. The Machiavellism is former to Machiavel.

Mo.se, S.sostris, Solomon, Lysandre, Philippe and Alexandre of Macedonia, Agathocle, Romulus, Tarquin, Jules C.sar, Auguste and even N.ron, Charlemagne, Th.odoric, Clovis, Hugues Capet, Louis XI, Gonzalve de Cordoue, C.sar Borgia, here are the ancestors of my doctrines. I from of pass, and of good, without to speak, of course, from those which came after me, whose list would be long, and to which the Treaty of the Prince did not learn anything but what they knew already, by the practice of the capacity. Who returned to me in your time a brighter homage than Frederic II? He refuted me the feather with the hand in the interest of his popularity and in policy he applied my doctrines rigorously.

By which unexplainable through human spirit one did me an objection of what I wrote in this work? As much would be worth to reproach the scientist for seeking the physical causes which bring the fall of the bodies which wound us while falling; with the doctor to describe the diseases, the chemist to make the history of the poisons, with the moralist to paint the defects, the historian to write the history.

MONTESQUIEU.

Oh! Machiavel, that Socrate is not it here to disentangle the sophism which hides in your words! If not very suited that nature made me with the discussion, it is hardly difficult for me to answer you: you compare with the poison and the disease the evils generated by the spirit of domination, easy way and violence; and these are these diseases that your writings teach the means of communicating to the States, they are these poisons that you learn how to distil. When the scientist, when the doctor, when the moralist, seek the evil, it is not to teach to propagate it; it is to cure it. However, it is what your book does not do; but little imports me, and I am not disarmed less by it. Moment when you do not set up the despotism in theory, of the moment when regard it to you yourself as an evil, it seems to to me that by that only condemn it to you, and on this point at least we can agree.

MACHIAVEL.

We are not it, Montesquieu, because you did not include/understand all my thought; I lent the side by acomparison to you of which it was too easy to triumph. The irony of Socrate, itself, would not worry me, because it was only one sophist who was useful himself, more skilfully than the others, of a false instrument, the logomachy. It is not your school and it is not mine: thus let us leave the words and the comparisons for us to hold some with the ideas. Here how I formulate my system, and I doubt that you shake it, because it is composed only of deductions of moral and political facts of an eternal truth: The bad instinct at the man is more powerful than the good. The man has more drive towards the evil than towards the good; fear and the force have on him more empire than the reason. I do not stop showing such truths; there was on your premise only the scatterbrained coterie of the baron d' Holbach, of which J. - J. Rousseau was the high priest and Diderot the apostle, to have been able to contradict them. The men aspire all to the domination, and it is not which was not oppressor, if it could it; all all or almost are ready to sacrifice the rights of others to their interests.

Who contains between them these devouring animals which one calls the men? With the origin of the companies, it is the brute force and without brake; later, it is the law, i.e. still the force, regulated by forms. You consulted all the sources of the history; everywhere the force appears before the right.

Political freedom is only one relative idea; the need for living is what dominates the States like the individuals.

Under certain latitudes of Europe, there are unable people of moderation in the exercise of freedom. If freedom is prolonged there, it is transformed into licence; the civil war or social arrives, and the State is lost, either that it splits and is dismembered by the effect of its own convulsions, or that its divisions return it the prey from abroad. Under similar conditions, the people prefer the despotism with anarchy; are they wrong?

The States once made up have two kinds of enemies: enemies of the inside and enemies of the outside. Which weapons will they employ in war against the foreigners? Will the two enemy Generals reciprocally communicate their plans of countryside to mutually put itself in a position to defend oneself? Will they prohibit the night attacks, the traps, the ambushes, the battles in an unequal number of troops? Not, undoubtedly, isn't this? and of similar combatants would prepare to laugh. And don't these traps, these artifices, all this strategy essential to the war, you want that one employs it against the enemies of the inside, against the factious ones? Undoubtedly, one will put at it less rigour; but, at the bottom, the rules will be the same ones. Is it possible to lead by the pure reason of the violent masses which are driven only by feelings, passions and prejudices?

That the direction of the businesses is entrusted to an autocrat, an oligarchy or to the people himself, no war, no negotiation, nointerior reform, will be able to succeed, without the help of these combinations which you appear to reject, but that you would have been obliged to employ yourself if the king of France had responsible you for the least business of State.

Puerile reprobation that that which struck the Treaty of the Prince! Does the policy have anything to disentangle with morals? Did you ever see only one State acting according to the principles which govern private morals? But any war would be a crime, even when it would have a cause right; any conquest having of another mobile only glory, would be a fixed price; very treated in which a power would have tipped the scales on its side, would be an unworthy fraud; any usurpation of the sovereign capacity would be an act which would deserve death. Nothing would be legitimate that what would be founded on the right! but, I said it a few moments ago to you, and I it maintenances, even in the presence of the contemporary history: all the sovereign capacities had the force for origin, or, which is the same thing, the negation of the right. Is this with saying that I proscribe it? Not; but I look it like extremely limited application, as well in the reports/ratios of the nations between them as in the reports/ratios of controlling with controlled.

This word of right itself, moreover, don't you see that it is of an infinite vagueness? Where does it start, where finishes it? When the right exist will, and when there will not exist? I take examples. Here a State: the bad organization of the authorities, the turbulence of the democracy, the impotence of the laws against the factious ones, the disorder which reigns everywhere, will precipitate it in the ruin. A bold man springs rows of the aristocracy or centre of the people; he breaks all the capacities made up; he puts the hand on the laws, he alters all the institutions, and he gives twenty years of peace to his country. Did it have the right to do what it did?

Pisistrate seizes the citadel by a blow of hand, and prepares the century of P.ricl.s. Brutus violates the monarchical Constitution of Rome, expels Tarquins, and melts with stabs a republic whose size is the most imposing spectacle which was given to the universe. But the fight between the patriciat and the plebs, which, as long as it was contained, made the vitality of the Republic, into pleasing dissolution, and all will perish. C.sar and Auguste appear; they are still transgressors; but the Roman empire which succeeded the Republic, thanks to them, hard as much as it, and succumbs only by covering the whole world of its remains. Was Eh well, the right with these daring men? Not, according to you. And however the posterity covered with glory; actually, they served and saved their country; they prolonged the existence of it through the centuries. You see well that in the States the principle of the right is dominated by that of the interest, and what is released from these considerations, it is that the good can leave the evil; that one arrives at the good by the evil, as one cures by the poison, like one saves the life by the edge of iron. I was concerned less with what is good andmoral that to what is useful and necessary; I took the companies such as they are, and I gave rules consequently.

Abstractedly speaking, violence and the easy way are they an evil? Yes; but they will have well to be employed to control the men, as long as the men will not be angels.

All is good or bad, according to the use that one makes of it and the fruit that one draws some; the end justifies the means: and now if you ask me why, me republican, I give everywhere the preference to the absolute government, I will say to you that, witness in my fatherland of the inconstancy and the cowardice of the rabble, his innate taste for the constraint, of his incapacity to conceive and observe the free living conditions; it is in my eyes a blind force which dissolves early or late, if it is not in the hand of only one man; I answer that the people, delivered to itself, will be able to only destroy themselves; that it will be able to never manage, neither to judge, nor to make the war. I will say to you that Greece shone only in the eclipses of freedom; that without the despotism of the Roman aristocracy, and that, later, without the despotism of the emperors, the bright age of Europe had never developed.

I will seek my examples in the modern States? They are if striking and so numerous that I will take the come first.

Under which institutions and which men the Italian republics have shone they? With which sovereigns Spain, France, Germany, do have made up they their power? Under the Leon X, the Jules II, the Philippe II, Barberousse, the Louis XIV, Napoleon, all men with the hand terrible, and more often posed on the guard of their swords than on the charter of their States.

But I am astonished to have spoken to convince so a long time illustrates it writer who listens to me. Isn't part of these ideas, if I am well informed, in the Spirit of the laws? This speech did it wound the serious man and cold which meditated, without passion, on the problems of the policy? The encyclopedists were not of Catons: the author of the Letters Persians was not a saint, nor even a quite enthusiastic excessively pious person. Our school, which one known as immoral, was perhaps attached to true God that the philosophers of the XVIIIe century.

MONTESQUIEU.

Your last words find me without anger, Machiavel, and I listened to you with attention. Do you want to hear me, and will let to me you use about it in your connection with same freedom?

MACHIAVEL.

I am held for dumb man, and I listen to in a respectful silence that which one called the legislator of the nations.

SECOND DIALOGUE.

MONTESQUIEU.

Your doctrines do not have anything for me again, Machiavel; and, if I test some embarrassment to refute them, it is much less because they worry my reason that because, false or true, they do not have basic philosophical. I hear well that you are, above all, a politician, and that the facts touch you more closely that the ideas. But you will agree however that, when it is about government, it is necessary to lead to principles. You make any place, in your policy, neither with morals, neither with the religion, nor with the right; you have with the mouth only two words: the force and easy way. If your system is reduced to saying that the force plays a great part in the human businesses, that the skill is a quality necessary to the statesman, you include/understand well that it is there a truth which does not need demonstration; but; if you set up violence in theory, the easy way in maxim of government; if you do not hold account in your calculations of any the laws of humanity, the code of tyranny is not any more that the code of the rough one, because the animals also are skilful and strong, and there is not, indeed, among them of other right that that of the brute force. But I do not believe that your fatalism itself goes up to that point, because you recognize the existence of the good and the evil.

Your principle, it is that the good can leave the evil, and that it is allowed to make the evil when it can about it result a good. Thus, you do not say: It is well in oneself to betray its word; it is well to use of the corruption, violence and the murder. But you say: One can betray when that is useful, to kill when that is necessary, to take the good of others when that is advantageous. I hasten to add that, in your system, these maxims apply only to the princes, and when it is their interests or those about the State. Consequently, the prince has the right to violate his oaths; he can pour blood with floods to seize the capacity or to be maintained there; he can strip those which he proscribed, to reverse all the laws, of to give news and to violate them still; to waste finances, to corrupt, compress, punish and strike unceasingly.

MACHIAVEL.

But this is not yourself which said that, in the despotic States fear was necessary, the useless virtue, the dangerous honor; that was needed a blind obedience, and that the prince was lost if it ceased raising the arm one moment [1].

MONTESQUIEU.

Yes, I said it; but when I noted, like you, the dreadfulconditions to which is maintained the tyrannical capacity, it was to fade it and not to raise furnace bridges to him; it was to inspire of it the horror with my fatherland which never, fortunately for it, did not curve the head under a similar yoke. How you do not see that the force is only one accident in the walk of the regular companies, and that the arbitrary capacities are obliged to seek their sanction in foreign considerations with the theories of the force. It is not only in the name of the interest, it is in the name of the duty that all the oppressors act. They violate it, but they call upon it; the doctrines of the interest are thus as impotent with it only as the means as it employs.

MACHIAVEL.

Here, I stop you; you make a share with the interest, that is enough to justify all the political needs which do not agree with the right.

MONTESQUIEU.

It is the reason of State which you call upon. Thus notice that I then not to give for base to the companies precisely what destroys them. In the name of the interest, the princes and the people, like the citizens, will commit only crimes. The interest of the State, you say! But how will I recognize if it is really advantageous for him to make such or such iniquity? Don't we know that the interest of the State, it is generally the interest of the prince in particular, or that of the corrupted favourites which surround it? I am not exposed to similar consequences by giving the right for base to the existence of the companies, because the notion of the right traces limits which the interest should not cross.

That if you ask me which is the base of the right, I will say to you that it is the morals whose precepts do not have anything doubtful nor obscure; because they are written in all the religions, and that they are printed in luminous characters in the conscience of the man. It is of this source pure that all the civil laws must rise, political, economic, international.

Ex eodem swears, sive ex eodem cast iron, sive ex eodem, principio.

But it is here that your inconsistency bursts; you are catholic, you are Christian; we adore same God, you admit its commands, you admit morals, you admit the right in the relationship of the men between them, and you press with the feet all these rules when it is of the State or the prince. In a word, the policy does not have anything to disentangle, according to you, with morals. You allow to the monarch what you defend on the subject. According to whether the same actions are achieved by the weak one or the fort, glorifiez them to you or blame them to you; they are crimes or virtues, according to the row of that which achieves them. Yourent the prince to have done them, and you send the subject to the gal.res. You thus do not think that with similar maxims, there is no company which can live; you believe that the subject will hold its oaths a long time when it sees the sovereign betraying them; that it will respect the laws when it knows that that which gave them to him violated, and that it violates them the every day; you believe that it will hesitate in the way of violence, the corruption and the fraud, when it will see there unceasingly walking those which are charged to lead it? You undeceive; will know that each usurpation of the prince in the field of the public thing authorizes a similar infringement in the sphere of the subject; that each political perfidy generates a social perfidy; that each violence in top legitimates a violence in bottom. Here for what looks at the citizens between them.

For what looks in their relationship with controlling, I do not need to say to you that it is the civil war introduced with the leaven state, within the company. The silence of the people is only the truce of overcome, for which the complaint is a crime. Wait until it awakes: you invented the theory of the force; be sure that it retained it. At the first day, it will break its chains; perhaps it will break them under the most futile pretext, and it will take again by the force what the force tore off to him.

The maxim of the despotism, it is the perinde ac cadaver Jesuits; to kill or killed: here is its law; it is the degradation today, the civil war tomorrow. It is as well, at least, as the things occur under the climates from Europe: in the East, the people sommeillent in peace in the depreciation of the constraint.

The princes cannot thus allow what private morals does not allow: it is my conclusion there; it is formal. You believed to embarrass me by proposing to me the example of many great men who, by accomplished bold acts in violation of the laws, had given peace to their country, sometimes glory; and it is from there that you draw your great argument: the good leaves the evil. I am touched little by it; it is not shown to me that these daring men made more although of evil; it is by no means established for me that the companies had been run away and had not supported without them. The means of hello which they bring do not compensate for the germs of dissolution which they introduce into the States. A few years of anarchy are often much less disastrous for a kingdom than several years of quiet despotism.

You admire the great men; I admire only the great institutions. I believe that, to be happy, the people need less men of genius than just men; but I grant you, if you it want, that some of the companies force for which you make the apology, could turn to the advantage of certain States. These acts could be justified in the ancient companies where the slavery and the dogma of fate reigned. One finds them in the Middle Ages and even in moderntimes; but as manners softened, that the lights were propagated among various people of Europe; with measurement, especially, that the principles of political science were known better, the right was substituted for the force in the principles as in the facts. Undoubtedly, the storms of freedom will always exist, and it will be still made many crimes on its behalf: but political fatalism does not exist any more. If you could say, in your time, that the despotism was an evil necessary, you could not it today, because, in the current state of manners and the political institutions among principal people of Europe, the despotism became impossible.

MACHIAVEL.

Impossible? à If you manage to prove that to me, I agree to take a step in the direction of your ideas.

MONTESQUIEU.

I you will prove it tr.s-facilement, if you want to still follow me well.

MACHIAVEL.

Tr.s-volontiers, but take guard; I believe that you engage much.

THIRD DIALOGUE.

MONTESQUIEU.

A thick mass of shades moves towards this beach; the area where us sums will be invaded soon. Come on this side; without that, we would not delay to be separate.

MACHIAVEL.

I did not find in your last words the precision which characterized your language at the beginning of our maintenance. I find that you exaggerated the consequences of the principles which are contained in the Spirit of the laws.

MONTESQUIEU.

I avoided intentionally, in this work, to make long theories. If you know it differently than by what you was brought back by it, you would see that the particular developments which I give you here rise without effort from the principles which I posed. Furthermore, I do not make difficulty in acknowledging only the knowledge which I acquired of new times did not modify or supplemented some of my ideas.

MACHIAVEL. Do you hope seriously to support that the despotism is incompatible with the political state of the people of Europe?

MONTESQUIEU.

I did not say all the people; but I will quote you, if you want, those at which the development of political science brought this great result.

MACHIAVEL.

Which are these people?

MONTESQUIEU.

England, France, Belgium, a portion of Italy, Prussia, Switzerland, the Germanic Confederation, Holland, Austria even, i.e., as you see it, almost all the part of Europe on which extended formerly the Roman world.

MACHIAVEL.

I know a little what occurred to Europe since 1527 until current time, and I acknowledge you that I am extremely curious to intend you to justify your proposal.

MONTESQUIEU.

Eh well, listen to me, and perhaps I will manage to convince you. They are not the men, in fact the institutions ensure the reign of freedom and the moralities in the States. Perfection or imperfection of the institutions depends all the good, but will depend necessarily also all the evil which can result for the men from their meeting in company; and, when I ask for the best institutions, you include/understand well that, according to the so beautiful word of Solon, I hear the most perfect institutions that the people can support. It is you to say that I do not conceive for them impossible conditions of existence, and that by there I separate from these deplorable reformers who claim to build the companies on pure rational assumptions without taking account of the climate, the practices, manners and even of the prejudices.

With the origin of the nations, the institutions are what they can. Antiquity showed us marvellous civilizations, States in which the conditions of the free government were admirably included/understood. The people of the Christian era had more difficulty in put their constitutions harmonizes some with the movement of the political life; but they benefitted from the lesson of antiquity, and with civilizations infinitely more complicated, they however arrived at more perfect results.

One of the primary causes of anarchy, like despotism, was the theoretical and practical ignorance in which the States of Europewere during so a long time on the principles which govern the organization of the capacities. How, when the principle of sovereignty lay only in the person of the prince, the right of the nation could it be marked? How, when that which was charged to make carry out the laws, was at the same time the legislator, his power it had not been tyrannical? How the citizens could be guaranteed against the arbitrary one, when, the legislative power and the executive power being already confused, the judicial power still came to meet in the same hand [2]?

I know well that certain freedoms, that certain public rights which are introduced early or late into the political practices least advanced, did not only leave bring obstacles to the unlimited exercise of the absolute royalty; that, on another side, fear to make shout the people, the spirit of softness of certain kings, carried them to use with moderation of the excessive capacities of which they were invested; but it is not less true than these so precarious guarantees were at the thank you of the monarch who had in theory the goods, the rights and the person of the subjects. Division of capacities has realized in Europe problem of companies free, and if something can soften for me the anxiety of the hours which precede the last judgement, it is the thought which my passage over the ground was not foreign with this great emancipation.

You were born, Machiavel, on the limits of the Middle Ages, and you saw, with the rebirth of arts, to open the dawn of modern times; but the company in the middle of which you lived, was, allow me to say it, still very impressed mistakes of cruelty; Europe was a tournament. The ideas of war, domination and conquest filled the head of the statesmen and the princes. The force was all then, the right very little of thing, I am appropriate about it; the kingdoms were like the prey of the conquerors; inside the States, the sovereigns fought against the large vassal ones; the large vassal ones crushed the cities. In the middle of the feudal anarchy which put all Europe out of weapons, the people pressed with the feet had been accustomed to look at the princes and the large ones like fatal divinities, to which mankind was delivered. You came in these times full with tumult, but so full with size. You saw intrepid captains, iron men, daring geniuses; and this world, filled with dark beauties in its disorder, appeared to you as it appears with an artist of which imagination would be struck than the moral direction; it is there what, in my eyes, explains the Treaty of the Prince, and you were not so far from the truth which you want to say well it, when a few moments ago, by an Italian pretence, you liked it, to probe me, to allot it to a whim of diplomat. But, since you, the world went; the people look at themselves today like the referees of their destinies: they have, make some as in right, destroy the privil.ges, destroy the aristocracy; they established a principle which would be quite new for you, going down from the marquis Hugo: they established the principle of the equality; they do not see any more in those which control them only agents; they carried out the principle of the equality by civil laws thatnothing could tear off to them. They are due to these laws as with their blood, because they cost, indeed, well blood with their ancestors.

I spoke to you a few moments ago about the wars: they always prevail, I know it; but, the first progress, it is that they do not give today any more to the winners the state-owned property overcome. A right that you hardly knew, the international law, governs today the reports/ratios of the nations between them, like the civil law governs the reports/ratios of the subjects in each nation.

After having ensured their laws private by civil laws, their public rights by treaties, the people wanted to put themselves in rule with their princes, and they ensured their political rights by constitutions. Delivered a long time to arbitrary by the confusion of the capacities, which made it possible to the princes to make tyrannical laws to exert them tyrannically, they separated the three capacities, legislature, executive and legal, by constitutional lines which cannot be crossed without alarm being given to all the body politic.

By this only reform, which is an immense fact, the interior public law was created, and the higher principles which constitute it find released. The person of the prince ceases being confused with that of the State; sovereignty seems having partly its source with the centre even of the nation, which makes the distribution of the capacities between the prince and the bodies politic independent from/to each other. I do not want to make, in front of the famous statesman which hears me, a developed theory of the mode which is called, in England and France, the constitutional mode; it passed today in manners of the principal States of Europe, non-seulement because it is the expression of highest political science, but especially because it is the only practical mode of government in the presence of the ideas of modern civilization.

In all times, under the reign of freedom as under that of tyranny, one could control only by laws. It is thus on the way in which the laws are made, that are founded all the guarantees of the citizens. If it is the prince who is the single legislator, it will make only tyrannical, happy laws if it does not upset the constitution of the State in a few years; but, in any case, one is in full absolutism; if it is a senate, one constituted oligarchy, mode odious with the people, because it gives him as many tyrants as Masters; if it is the people, one runs to anarchy, which is another manner of leading to the despotism; if it is an assembly elected by the people, the first part of the problem is already solved; because it is the base there even representative government, today into force in all the southernmost part of Europe.

But an assembly of representatives of the people which would only have with it all legislative sovereignty, would not be longmisusing her power, and in making run to the State the greatest dangers. The mode which was definitively constituted, happy transaction between the aristocracy, the democracy and the monarchical establishment, take part at the same time of these three shapes of government, by means of a weighting of capacities which seems to be the masterpiece of the human spirit. The person of the sovereign remains crowned, inviolable; but, while preserving a mass of capital attributions which, for the good of the State, must remain in its power, its essential role is nothing any more but to be the procurator of the execution of the laws. Not having more in its hand plenitude of the capacities, its responsibility is erased and passed on the head of the ministers whom it associates his government. The law, of which it with the exclusive proposal, or jointly with another trade, is prepared by a made up council men matured in the experiment of the businesses, subjected to a Upper House, hereditary or for life, which examines whether its provisions do not have anything opposite to the constitution, voted by an emanated legislative Body of the vote of the nation, applied by an independent magistrature. If the law is vicious, it is rejected or amended by the legislative Body: the Upper House is opposed to its adoption, if it is against the principles on which the constitution rests.

Triumph of this system so deeply conceived, and of which the mechanism, you include/understand it, can combine in thousand manners, according to the temperament of the people to which it applies, was to reconcile the order with freedom, stability with the movement, to make take part the universality of the citizens in the political life, by removing agitations of the public place. It is the country controlling itself, by the alternative displacement of the majorities, which influence in the rooms the appointment of the leader ministers.

The relationship between the prince and the subjects rests, as you see it, on a vast guarantee scheme whose bases in.branlables are in the civil order. No one cannot be reached in its person or her goods by an act of the administrative authority; the personal freedom is under the protection of the magistrates; in the criminal field, the defendants are judged by their pars; above all the jurisdictions, there is a supreme jurisdiction charged with breaking the judgments which would be handed down in violation of the laws. The citizens themselves are armed, for the defense of their rights, by the institution of middle-class militia which contribute to the police force of the cities; the ordinary person can, by way of petition, to make assemble his complaint to the feet of the sovereign assemblies which represent the nation. The communes are managed by public officers named with the election. Each year, of large provincial assemblies, also resulting from the vote, meet to express the needs and the wishes of the populations which surround them.

Such is the too weakened image, . Machiavel, of some of the institutions which flower today in the modern States, and in particular in my beautiful fatherland; but as publicity isgasoline of the free countries, all these institutions could not live a long time if they did not function at the great day. A still unknown power in your century, and which did nothing but be born from my time, came to give them the last breath of the life. It is the a long time proscribed press, still d.cri.e by ignorance, but to which one could the beautiful word that Adam Smith said, while speaking about the credit: It is a public highway. It is by this way, indeed, that all the evolution of ideas among modern people appears. The press exerts in the State like functions of police force: she expresses the needs, translates the complaints, denounces the abuses, the arbitrary acts; it constrained with morality all agents of the capacity; it is enough for him, for that, to put them opposite the opinion.

In companies thus regulated, . Machiavel, which share could you make with the ambition of the princes and the companies of tyranny? I am not unaware of by which painful convulsions this progress triumphed. In France, the freedom drowned in blood for the revolutionary period, was raised only with the Restoration. There, of new commotions still prepared; but already all principles, all the institutions of which I spoke to you, had passed in manners of France and of the people which revolve in the sphere of his civilization. I finished some, Machiavel. The States, like the sovereigns, are controlled today only by the rules of justice. The modern minister who would take as a starting point your lessons would not remain a year with the capacity; the monarch who would into practice put the maxims of the Treaty of the Prince would raise against him the reprobation of his subjects; he would be put at the round of applause of Europe.

MACHIAVEL.

You believe?

MONTESQUIEU.

Will you forgive me my frankness?

MACHIAVEL.

Why not?

MONTESQUIEU.

Must I think that your ideas somewhat changed?

MACHIAVEL.

I propose to demolish, part with part, all the beautiful things which you have just said, and to show you that these are the doctrines alone which carry it even today, in spite of the new ideas, new manners, your alleged principles of public law, despite everything the institutions from which you come to speakto me; but allow me, before, to address a question to you: Where did you remain about it of the contemporary history?

MONTESQUIEU.

The concepts that I acquired on the various States of Europe go until the last days of the year 1847. The chances of my walk wandering through these infinite spaces and the confused multitude of the hearts which fill them, me made of it meet no which could inform me beyond the time that I have just said to you. Since I am descended in the stay from darkness, I spent one half-century approximately among the people of the old world, and it is hardly but since one quarter century that I met the legions of the modern people; still should it be said that the majority arrived of the most moved back corners of the universe. I do not know even with the Juste at which year of the world are we.

MACHIAVEL.

Here, the last are thus the first, . Montesquieu! The statesman of the Middle Ages, the policy of cruel times, is more that the philosopher of the eighteenth century on the history of modern times. The people are in the year of grace 1864.

MONTESQUIEU.

Please thus let me know, Machiavel, I request some from you urgently, which occurred to Europe since the year 1847.

MACHIAVEL.

Not, if you allow it, before I would have given the pleasure of carrying the rout within your theories.

MONTESQUIEU.

As you will like it; but believe well that I do not conceive null concern in this respect. It takes centuries to change the principles and the shape of the governments under which the people took the practice to live. No new political teaching could not result the fifteen years which have been just passed; and, in all the cases, if it were thus, in fact the doctrines of Machiavel never would have triumphed.

MACHIAVEL.

You think it as follows: thus listen to me in your turn.

FOURTH DIALOGUE.

MACHIAVEL.

By listening to your theories on the division of the capacities and the benefits which the people of Europe owe him, I could not prevent me from admiring, Montesquieu, at which point the illusion of the systems can seize great minds the.

Allured by the institutions of England, you believed to be able to make constitutional mode the universal panacea of the States; but you counted without the irresistible movement which tears off today the companies with their traditions of the day before. It will not do without two centuries before this shape of government, that you admire, is nothing any more in Europe but one to remember historical, something from out of date and null and void as the rule from the three units from Aristote.

Initially allow me to examine in itself your political mechanics: you balance the three capacities, and confine them to you each one in their department; this one will make the laws, this other will apply them, a third will carry out them: the prince will reign, the ministers will control. Marvellous thing that this constitutional rocker! You very envisaged, very regulated, except the movement: the triumph of such a system, it would not be the action; it would be the immobility if the mechanism functioned with precision; but, actually, the things will not occur thus. On the first occasion, the movement will occur by the rupture of one of the springs which you so carefully forged. Do you believe that the capacities will remain a long time within the constitutional limits that you assigned to them, and that they will not manage to cross them? Which is the independent legislative assembly which will not aspire to sovereignty? Which is the magistrature which will not bend with the liking of the opinion? Which is the prince, especially, sovereign of a kingdom or chief of a republic, which will accept without reserve the passive role to which will have condemned it to you; who, in the secrecy of his thought, will not contemplate the inversion of the rival capacities which obstruct its action? Actually, you will have put at the catches all the contrary forces, caused all the companies, given weapons to all the parties. You will have delivered the capacity to the attack of all the ambitions, and makes State an arena where the factions will break out. In little time, it will be the disorder everywhere; inexhaustible rh.teurs will transform into verbal sparring matches the deliberating assemblies; daring journalists, unrestrained lampoonists will attack the every day the person of the sovereign, will discredit the government, the ministers, the men in placeà.

MONTESQUIEU.

I for a long time know these reproaches addressed to the free governments. They do not have a value in my eyes: the abuses do not condemn the institutions. I know many States which live in peace, and for a long time under such laws: I lime pits those which cannot live there.

MACHIAVEL. Wait: In your calculations, you took into account only social minorities. There are gigantic populations rivetted with work by poverty, as they were it formerly by slavery. What imports, I require it of you, with their happiness all your fictions parliamentary? Your great political movement did not succeed, ultimately, that with the triumph of a minority privileged by the chance as the old nobility was it by the birth. What imports with the proletarian curved on his labour, overpowered under the weight of its destiny, which some speakers have the right to speak, that some journalists have the right to write? You created rights which will remain eternally for the mass of the people to the state of pure faculty, since it would not know to make use of it. These rights, whose law recognizes the ideal pleasure to him and for which the need refuses the real exercise to him, are for him only one bitter irony of its destiny. I answer you that one day it will take them of hatred, and that it will destroy them its hand to entrust to the despotism.

MONTESQUIEU.

Which Machiavel contempt does it thus have for humanity, and which idea it is made lowness of the modern people? Powerful God, I will not believe whom you created them so cheap. Machiavel, no matter what he says some, is unaware of the principles and the conditions of existence of current civilization. Work today is the common law, as it is the divine law; and, far it is a sign of constraint among the men, it is the bond of their association, the instrument of their equality.

The political rights do not have anything illusory for the people in the States where the law does not recognize a privil.ges and where all the careers are opened with the individual activity. Undoubtedly, and in no company it could some be differently, the inequality of the intelligences and of fortunes involves for the individuals of inevitable inequalities in the exercise of their rights; but isn't it enough that these rights exist so that the wish of an enlightened philosophy is filled, so that the emancipation of the men is assured insofar as it can be it? For these same as the chance gave birth to under the humblest conditions, isn't only food in the feeling of their independence and their dignity of citizens? But it is there only one side of the question; because if the moral size of the people is related to freedom, they are not attached there less narrowly by their material interests.

MACHIAVEL.

It is here that I awaited you. The school to which you belong posed principles of which it does not appear to see the last consequences: you believe that they lead to the reign of the reason; I will show you that they bring back to the reign of the force. Your political system, taken in its original purity, consists in giving a share of action about equal to the various groups of forces of which the companies are composed, to makecontribute in a right proportion the social activities; you do not want only the element aristocratic precedes the democratic element. However, the temperament of your institutions is to give more force to the aristocracy than with the people, more force with the prince than with the aristocracy, thus proportioning the capacities with the political capacity of those which must exert them.

MONTESQUIEU.

You say true.

MACHIAVEL.

You make take part the various classes of the company in the public office according to the degree of their aptitude and their lights; you .mancipez the middle-class by the vote, you contain the people by the taxable quota; popular freedoms create the power of the opinion, the aristocracy gives the prestige in the great ways, the throne throws on the nation the glare of the supreme row; you keep all the traditions, all the great memories, the worship of all the large things. On the surface one sees a monarchical company, but all is democratic at the bottom; because, actually, there are barriers between the classes, and work is the instrument of all fortunes. Isn't this about that?

MONTESQUIEU.

Yes, Machiavel; and you can at least include/understand the opinions that you do not divide.

MACHIAVEL.

Eh well, all these beautiful things passed or will pass like a dream; because you have a new principle with which all the institutions break up with a striking down speed.

MONTESQUIEU.

Which is thus this principle?

MACHIAVEL.

It is that of popular sovereignty. One will find, do not doubt it, the quadrature of the circle before managing to reconcile the balance of power with the existence of a similar principle at the nations where it is allowed. The people, by an absolutely inevitable consequence, will seize, one day or the other, of all the capacities which one recognized that the principle was in him. Will this be to keep them? Not. After a few days of madness, it will throw them, by lassitude, with the first soldier of fortune which will be on its way. In your country, you saw, in 1793, how the French executioners treated representative monarchy: the sovereign people were affirmed by the torment ofhis king, then it made litter of all its rights; it was given to Robespierre, Barras, Bonaparte.

You are a large thinker, but you do not know the inexhaustible cowardice of the people; I do not say those of my time, but of those of yours; crawling in front of the force, without pity in front of the weakness, relentless for faults, lenient for crimes, incompetents to support contrarieties of a free mode, and patients until martyrdom for all violences of the daring despotism, breaking the thrones in moments of anger, and giving each other Masters to who they forgive of the attacks for the least of which they twenty constitutional kings would have decapitated.

Thus seek justice; seek the right, stability, the order, the respect of the so complicated shapes of your parliamentary mechanism with masses violent, undisciplined, uncultivated, to which you said: You are the right, you are the Masters, you are the referees of the State! Oh! I know well that careful Montesquieu, the circumspect policy, which posed the principles and reserved the consequences, did not write in the Spirit of the laws the dogma of popular sovereignty; but, as you said it a few moments ago, the consequences rise from themselves from the principles which you posed. The affinity of your doctrines with those of the social Contract is felt enough. Also, since the day when the French revolutionists, swearing in verba magistri, wrote: "A constitution can be only the free work of a convention between associates," the government monarchical and parliamentary was condemned to died in your fatherland. Vainly one tried to restore the principles, vainly your king, Louis XVIII, while returning to France, it tried to make go up the capacities with their source by promulgating the declarations of 89 like proceeding of the royal granting, this pious fiction of aristocratic monarchy was in too obvious contradiction with the past: it was to disappear with the noise of the revolution of 1830, like the government of 1830, in its turnà.

MONTESQUIEU.

Complete.

MACHIAVEL.

Let us not anticipate. What you know, like me, of the past, authorizes me, as of now, with saying that the principle of popular sovereignty is destructive of any stability, that it sanctions the right of the revolutions indefinitely. It puts the companies in open war against all the human capacities and even against God; it is the incarnation even of the force. It makes of the people rough wild which fall asleep when it is repue of blood, and that one connects; and here the invariable walk which the companies follow then whose movement is regulated on this principle: popular sovereignty generates the demagogy, the demagogy generates anarchy, anarchy brings back to the despotism.The despotism, for you, it is cruelty. Eh well, you see that the people turn over to cruelty by the way of civilization.

But it is not all, and I claim that from other points of view still the despotism is the only shape of government which is really appropriate to the social state of the modern people. You said to me that their material interests attached them to freedom; here, you make me too beautiful play. Which are, in general, the States which need freedom? It is those which live by great feelings, by great passions, heroism, by the faith, even by the honor, as said it to you your time while speaking about French monarchy. Stoicism can make free people; Christianity, under certain conditions, could have same the privil.ge. I include/understand needs of freedom with Athens, with Rome, at nations which breathed that by glory of weapons, whose war satisfied all the expansions, which needed besides all energies of patriotism, of all civic enthusiasms to triumph over their enemies.

Public freedoms were the natural inheritance of the States in which the servile and industrial functions were forsaken with the slaves, where the man was useless if he were not a citizen. I still conceive freedom at certain times of the Christian era, and in particular in the small States connected to each other by systems of confederation similar to those of the Hellenic Republics, as in Italy and Germany. There I find part of the natural causes which made freedom necessary. It had been almost inoffensive in times when the principle of the authority was not questioned, where the religion had an absolute empire on the spirits, where the people, placed under the guardian mode of the corporations, went submissively under the hand of its pastors. If its political emancipation had been undertaken then, it could have been it without danger; because it had been achieved in conformity of the principles on which the existence of all the companies rests. But, with your great States, which do not live any more but by industry; with your populations without God and faith, in times when the people are not satisfied any more by the war, and where them activity forces necessarily refers to the inside, freedom, with the principles which is used to him as base, cannot be that a cause of dissolution and ruin. I add that it is not more necessary to the moral needs for the individuals than it is it in the States.

Lassitude of the ideas and shock of the revolutions left the cold and disillusioned companies which are arrived at indifference in policy as in religion, which does not have any more an other stimulating but the material pleasures, which do not live any more but by the interest, which have of another worship only gold, whose mercantile manners dispute it with those of the Jews that they took for models. Do you believe that it is by love of freedom in itself that the lower classes try to go up to the attack of the capacity? It is by hatred of those which have; at the bottom, it is to tear off their richnesses, instrument of the pleasures to them which they envy. Those which have beseech on all the sides an energetic arm, a strong capacity; they ask him only one thing, it is to protect the State counters agitations which its weak constitution could not resist, to give them to themselves safety necessary so that they can enjoy and make their deals. Which shapes of government want to apply to companies where the corruption slipped everywhere, where fortune is acquired only by the surprises of the fraud, where morals does not have more guarantee but in the repressive laws, where the feeling of the fatherland itself died out in I do not know which universal cosmopolitanism?

I do not see safety for these companies, true idols with feet of clay, that in the institution of a centralization with excess, which places all the police force at the disposal of those which control; in a hierarchical administration similar to that of the Roman empire, which mechanically regulates all the movements of the individuals; in a vast system of legislation which takes again in detail all freedoms which were imprudently given; in a gigantic despotism, finally, which can strike immediately and at any hour, all that resists, all that complains. C.sarisme of the Lower Empire appears me to carry out rather well what I wish for the wellbeing of the modern societies. Thanks to these vast apparatuses which function already, has one says me, in addition to one country of Europe, they can live in peace, as in China, as in Japan, as in India. It is not necessary that a vulgar prejudice makes us scorn these Eastern civilizations, from which one learns each day with better appreciating the institutions. The Chinese people, for example, are a managed very-tradesman and tr.s-bien.

FIFTH DIALOGUE.

MONTESQUIEU.

I hesitate to answer you, Machiavel, because there is in your last words I do not know which satanic mocking remark, which internally leaves me the suspicion which your speeches do not agree compl.tement with your secret thoughts. Yes, you have the fatal eloquence which makes lose the trace of the truth, and you are well sinks it genius whose name is still the fear of the generations present. I recognize willingly, however, that with such a powerful spirit one would lose too much to keep silent oneself; I want to listen to you until the end, and I want even to answer you though, as of now, I have little hope to convince you. You have just made modern society a really sinister table; I then to know if it is faithful, but it is at least incomplete, because in any thing, beside the evil there is the good, and you showed me only the evil; you do not have me, moreover, not given the means of checking up to which point you are in truth, because I know neither of which people nor of which States you wanted to speak, when you made me this black painting of contemporary manners. MACHIAVEL.

Eh well, let us admit that I took for example that of all the nations of Europe which is advanced in civilization, and to which, I hasten to say it, could less apply the portrait that I have just madeà.

MONTESQUIEU.

It is thus of France that you want to speak?

MACHIAVEL.

Eh well, yes.

MONTESQUIEU.

You are right, because it is there that the dark doctrines of the materialism penetrated the least. It is France which remained the hearth of the great ideas and of great passions whose you believe the dried up source, and it is from there that these great principles left the public law, to which you do not make a place in the government of the States.

MACHIAVEL.

You can add that it is the devoted field of experiment of the political theories.

MONTESQUIEU.

I do not know an experiment which still profited, in a durable way, with the establishment of the despotism, in France not more than elsewhere, at the contemporary nations; and it is what first of all makes me find well not very in conformity with the reality of the things, your theories on the need for the absolute capacity. I know, until now, only two States in Europe compl.tement private of the liberal institutions, which modified of all shares the pure monarchical element: they are Turkey and Russia, and still if you look at close with the interior movements which take place within this last power, would find perhaps there you the symptoms of a nearest transformation. You announce to me admittedly that, in a more or less brought closer future, the people, threatened of an inevitable dissolution, will return to the despotism as to the arch of hello; that they will be constituted in the form of great absolute monarchies, similar to those of Asia; it is only one prediction there: in how long will it be achieved?

MACHIAVEL.

Before one century.

MONTESQUIEU. You are a soothsayer; one century, it of is gained always as much; but let to me say to you now why your prediction will not be achieved. The modern societies should not be considered any more today with the eyes of the past. Their manners, their practices, their needs, all changed. One thus should not proud without reserve for inductions of the historical analogy, when it is a question of judging their destinies. It is necessary to especially take care to take for universal laws of the facts which are only accidents, and not to transform into general rules the needs for such situations or such times. The EC what the despotism arrived several times in the history, like consequence of the social disturbances, does follow that it must be taken for rule of government? The EC what it could be used as transition in the past, will conclude from it I that it is specific to solve the crises of the modern times? Isn't it more rational to say than other evils call other remedies, other problems of other solutions, other social manners of other political practices? An invariable law of the companies, it is that they tend to the improvement, with progress; eternal wisdom has there, if I then the statement, condemned; it refused the movement in contrary direction to them. This progress, it is necessary that they reach it.

MACHIAVEL.

Or that they die.

MONTESQUIEU.

We do not place in the extremes; the companies never die when they are in way of childbirth. When they were constituted under the mode which is appropriate to them, their institutions can deteriorate, fall in decline and perish; but they lasted several centuries. Thus the various people of Europe passed, by successive transformations, feudal system with the monarchical system, and pure monarchical system with the constitutional mode. This progressive development, of which the unit is so imposing, does not have anything fortuitous; it arrived as the consequence necessary of the movement which took place in the ideas before being translated in the facts.

The companies can have the other shapes of government only those which are in connection with their principles, and it is against this absolute law that you are registered, when you believe the despotism compatible with modern civilization. As long as the people looked at sovereignty like a pure emanation of the divine will, they were subjected without murmur to the absolute capacity; as long as their institutions were insufficient to ensure their walk, they accepted the arbitrary one. But, of the day when their rights were recognized and solemnly declared; day when more fertile institutions could solve by freedom all the functions of the social body, the policy with the use of the princes fell from high sound; the capacity became like a dependence of the public domain; the art of the governmentchanged into a business of administration. Today the things are ordered of such kind, in the States, that the leading power does not appear to with it any more but like the engine of the organized forces.

Undoubtedly, if you suppose these infected companies of all the corruptions, of all the defects about which you speak to me it has only one moment there, they walk of a fast step towards the decomposition; but how don't you see only the argument that you draw some is a true petition of principle? Since when freedom does lower the hearts and degrades it the characters? They are not there the lesson of the history; because it attests everywhere in features of fire that the largest people were the freest people. If manners were degraded, like say it to you, in some part of Europe which I am unaware of, it is that the despotism would have passed there; it is that freedom would be extinct there; it thus should be maintained where it is, and to restore it where it is not any more.

We are, in this moment, do not forget it, on the ground of the principles; and if yours different from the miens, I ask them to be invariable; however, I do not know any more where I am when I intend you to praise freedom in antiquity, and to proscribe it in modern times, to push back it or admit it according to times or the places. These distinctions, by supposing them justified, do not leave of it less the intact principle, and it is with the principle alone that I stick.

MACHIAVEL.

Like a skilful pilot, I see that you avoid the pitfalls, by holding you in the open sea. The general information is of a great help in the discussion; but I acknowledge that I am very-impatient of knowing how the Montesquieu low register will draw some with the principle from popular sovereignty. I could not know, until this moment, if it made, or not, started from your system. Do you admit it, or you do not admit it?

MONTESQUIEU.

I then to answer a question which arises in these terms.

MACHIAVEL.

I knew well that your reason itself would be disturbed in front of this phantom.

MONTESQUIEU.

You are mistaken, Machiavel; but, before answering you, I was to point out to you what were my writings and the character of the mission that they could fill. You made my name interdependent of iniquities of the French revolution: it is a quite severe judgement for the philosopher who walked of a so careful step inthe research of the truth. Born in one century from intellectual effervescence, the day before a revolution which was to carry in my fatherland the old shapes of the monarchical government, I then to say that none the nearest consequences of the movement which was done in the ideas escaped my sight consequently. I pus to ignore that the system of the division of the capacities would move necessarily a day the si.ge of sovereignty.

This principle, badly known, badly defined, badly especially applied, could generate terrible ambiguities, and upset the basic French company in roof. The feeling of these dangers became the rule of my works. Also while imprudent innovators, attacking the source immediately to be able it, prepared, to their knowledge, a formidable catastrophe, I only endeavoured to study the shapes of the free governments, to work out the principles themselves which govern their establishment. Statesman rather than philosopher, jurisconsult more than theologist, legislator practical, if the boldness of such a word is allowed to me, rather than theorist, I believed to make more for my country while learning how to him to control itself, than by questioning the principle even of the authority. God however does not like that I try to make me a purer merit at the expense of those which, like me, sought the truth in good faith! We made all of the faults, but with each one the responsibility for its works.

Yes, Machiavel, and it is a concession which I do not hesitate to make you, you were right a few moments ago when you say that it had been necessary that the emancipation of the French people was made in conformity higher principles which govern the existence of the human societies, and this reserve enables to you to foresee the judgement which I will carry on the principle of popular sovereignty.

Initially, I do not admit a designation which seems to exclude from sovereignty the most enlightened classes of the company. This distinction is fundamental, because it will make of a State a pure democracy or a representative State. If sovereignty resides some share, it resides in the very whole nation; I will thus call it first of all national sovereignty. But the idea of this sovereignty is not an absolute truth, it is only relative. The sovereignty of the human capacity corresponds to a deeply subversive idea, the sovereignty of the human right; it is these doctrines materialist and atheist, who precipitated the French revolution in blood, and inflicted the opprobrium of the despotism to him after is delirious of independence. It is not exact to say that the nations are main absolute their destinies, because their main sovereign it is God himself, and they will be never out of its power. If they had absolute sovereignty, they could all, even against eternal justice, even against God; who would dare outward journey up to that point? But the principle of the divine right, with the significance which is commonly attached there, is not a less disastrous principle, because it dedicates the people with the obscurantism, arbitrary, nothing, it reconstitutes the mode of the castes logically, it turns intoto people a herd of slaves, conduits, as in India, by the hand of the priests, and trembling under the rod of the Master. How would it be differently? If the sovereign is the envoy of God, if he is the representative even of the Divinity on the ground, he has all to be able on the human creatures subjected to his empire, and this capacity will have brake only in general rules of equity, of which it will be always easy to be freed.

It is in the field which separates these two extreme opinions, that delivered the furious battles of the spirit of party; the ones exclaim: Not divine authority! others: Not human authority! O Supreme providence, my reason refuses to accept one or the other of these alternatives; they appear both to me an equal blasphemy against your wisdom! Between the divine right which exclude the man and the human right who excludes God, it there with the truth, Machiavel; the nations as the individuals are free between the hands of God. They have all the rights, all the capacities, with the load to use about it according to the rules of eternal justice. Human sovereignty east in the sense that it is given by the men, and that they are the men who exert it; it is divine in the sense that it is instituted by God, and that it can be exerted only according to the precepts which he established.

SIXTH DIALOGUE.

MACHIAVEL.

I would wish to arrive at precise consequences. Until where the hand of God it extends on humanity? Who makes the sovereigns?

MONTESQUIEU.

They are the people.

MACHIAVEL.

It is written: Reigning Per me reges. What means literally: God makes the kings.

MONTESQUIEU.

It is a translation with the use of the Prince, . Machiavel, and it was borrowed to you in this century by one of your more famous partisans [3], but it is not that of the Scriptures. God instituted sovereignty, it does not institute the sovereigns. Its all-powerful hand stopped there, because it is there that starts the human free will. The kings reign according to my commands, they must reign according to my law, such is the direction of the divine book. If it were different, it would have to be said that the goods as the bad princes are establish by Providence; it would be necessary to be inclined in front of N.ron like Titusfront, in front of Caligula like Vespasien front. Not, God did not want that the dominations more the sacrileges could call upon its protection, that the cheappest tyrannies could be claimed of its nomination. To the people as with the kings it left the responsibility for their acts. MACHIAVEL.

I doubt extremely that all that is orthodoxe. At all events, following, they are to you the people which have the sovereign authority?

MONTESQUIEU.

Take guard, by disputing it, to raise you against a truth of pure common direction. It is not there an innovation in the history. In old times, with the Middle Ages, everywhere where the domination was established apart from the invasion or of the conquest, the sovereign capacity occurred by the free will of the people, in the original form of the election. To quote only one example of it, thus in France the chief of the race carlovingienne succeeded the descendants of Clovis, and the dynasty of Hugues Capet to that of Charlemagne [4]. Undoubtedly heredity came to replace the election. The glare of the rendered services, the public recognition, the traditions fixed sovereignty in the principal families of Europe, and nothing was legitimate any more. But the principle of the national absolute power was constantly found at the bottom of the revolutions, it was always called for the dedication of the new capacities. It is a former and preexistent principle which did nothing but be carried out more narrowly in the various constitutions of the modern States.

MACHIAVEL.

But if they are the people which choose their Masters, they can thus also reverse them? If they have the right to establish the shape of government which agrees to them, which will prevent them from changing some with the liking of their whim? It will not be the mode of the order and of the freedom which will leave your doctrines, it will be the indefinite era of the revolutions.

MONTESQUIEU.

You confuse the right with the abuse which can result from its exercise, the principles with their application; it is there fundamental distinctions, without which one cannot get along.

MACHIAVEL.

Do not hope to escape to me, I ask you logical consequences; refuse the-me if you want it. I wish knowledge if, according to your principles, the people have the right to reverse their sovereigns?

MONTESQUIEU.

Yes, in extreme cases and for right causes.

MACHIAVEL.

Who will be a judge of these extreme cases and the justice of these ends?

MONTESQUIEU.

And which want you which is it, if not the people themselves? The things are they passed differently since the beginning of the world? It is a frightening undoubtedly, but salutary, but inevitable sanction there. How don't you see only the contrary doctrines, that which would order with the men the respect of the most odious governments, would make them fall down under the yoke of monarchical fatalism?

MACHIAVEL.

Your system has only one disadvantage, it is that it supposes the infallibility of the reason among people; but don't they have, like the men, their passions, their errors, their injustices?

MONTESQUIEU.

When the people make faults, they will be punished by it as men who sinned against the moral law.

MACHIAVEL.

And how?

MONTESQUIEU.

They will be punished by it by the plagues of the discord, anarchy, the despotism even. There is not other justice on the ground, while waiting for that of God.

MACHIAVEL.

You have just pronounced the word of despotism, you see that one returns there.

MONTESQUIEU.

This objection is not worthy of your great mind, Machiavel; I lent myself to the most extreme consequences of the principles which you fight, that was enough so that the notion of the true barrel distorted. God granted to the people neither the capacity, nor the will to thus change the shapes of government which are the essential mode of their existence. In the political companies as in the organized beings, the limiting nature of the things ofitself the expansion of the free forces. It is necessary that the range of your argument is restricted with what is acceptable for the reason.

You believe that, under the influence of the modern ideas, the revolutions will be more frequent; they will not be it more, it is possible they are it less. The nations, indeed, as you said it a few moments ago, currently live by industry, and what appears to you a cause of constraint is all at the same time a principle of order and freedom. Industrial civilizations have wounds which I am not unaware of, but their benefits should not be denied, nor to denature their tendencies. Companies which live by work, the exchange, the credit are primarily Christian companies, no matter what one says, because all these so powerful forms and if varied industry are at the bottom only the application of some great ideas morals borrowed from Christianity, source of any force like any truth.

Industry plays a so considerable part in the movement of the modern societies, which one cannot make, from the point of view where you place yourselves, no exact calculation without taking account of its influence; and this influence is not at all that which you believed to be able to assign to him. The science which seeks the reports/ratios of the industrial life and the maxims which emerge some, are all that there is of more contrary with the principle of the concentration of the capacities. The tendency of the political economy is to see in the political organization only one mechanism necessary, but very-expensive, of which the springs should be simplified, and it reduces the role of the government to so elementary functions, which its greater disadvantage is perhaps to destroy prestige of it. Industry is enemy-born revolutions, because without the social order it perishes and with it the vital movement of the modern people stops. It cannot do without freedom, because it lives only by manifestations of freedom; and, notice it, freedoms as regards industry generate necessarily political freedoms, so that one could say that the most advanced people in industry are also most advanced in freedom. Leave India there and leave China which live under the blind destiny of the absolute monarchy, throw the eyes in Europe, and you will see.

You have just pronounced again the word of despotism, eh well, Machiavel, you of which sinks it genius was so deeply assimilated all the tunnels, all the occult combinations, all the artifices of laws and government with the help of which one can connect the movement of the arms and the thought among people; you which scorn the men, you who dream for them the terrible dominations of the East, you whose political doctrines are borrowed from the alarming theories of Indian mythology, want to say me, I you of entreat, how you there would take to organize despotism at people of which public law rests primarily on freedom, whose morals and religion develop all the movements in the same direction, at Christian nations which live by the trade and industry, in States whose bodies politic are in the presence of the publicity of thepress which throws floods of light in the most obscure corners of the capacity; call upon all the resources of your powerful imagination, seek, invent, and if you solve this problem, I will declare with you that the modern spirit is overcome.

MACHIAVEL.

Guard, you take give me beautiful play, I could take to you with the word.

MONTESQUIEU.

Do it, I entreat you.

MACHIAVEL.

I hope well not to miss there.

MONTESQUIEU.

In a few hours we will be perhaps separate. These trimmings are not known, follow me in the turnings for you which I will make with you along this dark path, we will be able to avoid still a few hours the backward flow of the shades that you see over there.

SEVENTH DIALOGUE.

MACHIAVEL.

We can stop here.

MONTESQUIEU.

I listen to you.

MACHIAVEL.

I must say to you initially that you were mistaken in the whole to the whole on the application of my principles. The despotism always arises at your eyes with the null and void forms of the Eastern monarchism, but it is not as I hear it; for new companies, it is necessary to employ new processes. It is not a question today, to control, to make violent iniquities, to decapitate its enemies, to strip its subjects of their goods, to lavish the torments; not, the physical death, spoliation and torments can play only one rather secondary part in the domestic policy of the modern States.

MONTESQUIEU.

They is happy. MACHIAVEL.

Undoubtedly I have little admiration, I acknowledge it, for your civilizations with cylinders and pipes; but I walk, believe it well, with the century; the power of the doctrines to which my name is attached, it is that they adapt to all times and all the situations. Machiavel today has grandsons who know the price of his lessons. Me am believed quite old, and the every day I renovated on the ground.

MONTESQUIEU.

Do you scoff?

MACHIAVEL.

Listen to me and will judge you. It is a question less today of forcing the men than to disarm them, to compress their political passions to erase them, to fight their instincts to mislead them, to proscribe their ideas to give them the exchange by adapting them.

MONTESQUIEU.

And how that? Because I do not hear this language.

MACHIAVEL.

Allow; it is there the moral part of the policy, we will arrive presently at the applications. The principal secrecy of the government consists in weakening the public spirit, at the point compl.tement to satisfy it of the ideas and the principles with which one makes the revolutions today. In all times, the people as the men treated to words. Appearances are enough for them almost always; they do not ask any more. One can thus establish factitious institutions which answer a language and also factitious ideas; it is necessary to have the talent to charm with the parties this liberal phraseology, with which they are armed against the government. It is necessary to saturate the people until lassitude with them, until the dislike. One speaks often today about the power of the opinion, I will show you that one makes him express what one wants when one knows well the hidden springs of the capacity. But for thinking of directing it, it is necessary to daze it, strike it uncertainty by astonishing contradictions, to operate it ceaseless diversions, to dazzle it by all kinds of various movements, imperceptibly to mislay it in its ways. One of the great secrecies of the day is to know to seize the prejudices and popular passions, so as to introduce a confusion of principles which makes any agreement impossible between those which speak the same language and have the same interests.

MONTESQUIEU.

Where go with these words whose darkness has something of disaster?

MACHIAVEL.

If wise Montesquieu intends to put feeling at the place of the policy, I must perhaps stop here; I did not claim to place me on the ground of morals. You defied me to stop the movement in your companies unceasingly tormented by the spirit of anarchy and revolt. Do you want to let to me say how I would solve the problem? You can put at the shelter your scruples by accepting this thesis like a question of pure curiosity.

MONTESQUIEU.

That is to say.

MACHIAVEL.

I conceive besides that you ask me for more precise information, I will arrive there; but let to me say to you initially to which essential conditions the prince can hope today to consolidate his capacity. It will have to stick before very destroying the parties, to dissolve the collective forces everywhere where they exist, to paralyse in all its demonstrations the individual initiative; then the level of the characters will go down from itself, and all the arms will weaken soon against the constraint. The absolute capacity will not be any more one accident, it will become a need. These political precepts are not entirely new, but, as I said it to you, in fact the processes must be it. A great number of these results can be obtained by simple payments of police force and administration. In your so beautiful companies, ordered so well, at the place of the absolute monarchs, you put a monster which is called the State, new Briar.e from which the arms extend everywhere, colossal organization of tyranny in the shade of which the despotism will always reappear. Eh well, under the invocation of the State, nothing will be easier than to consume the work occults about which I spoke to you a few moments ago, and the most powerful means of action perhaps will be precisely those which one will have the talent to borrow from this same industrial mode which makes your admiration.

Using the only lawful capacity, I would institute, for example, of immense financial monopolies, reserves of the public fortune, whose the fate would depend so closely on all private fortunes, that they would absorb with the credit of the State the shortly after any political catastrophe. You are an economist, Montesquieu, weigh the value of this combination.

Chief of the government, all my edicts, all my ordinances would tend constantly to the same goal: to destroy the collective and individual forces; to develop the preponderance of the State inordinately, to make of it the sovereign protective, promoterand remunerative.

Here another borrowed combination has the industrial order: In current time, the aristocracy, as a political force, disappeared; but the territorial middle-class is still an element of dangerous resistance for the governments, because it is of itself, independent; it can be necessary to impoverish it or to even ruin it compl.tement. It is enough, for that, to worsen the loads which weigh on the land and buildings, to maintain agriculture in a state of relative inferiority, to support with excess the trade and industry, but mainly the speculation; because the too great prosperity of industry can itself become a danger, by creating a too considerable number of independent fortunes.

One will react usefully against the large industrialists, against the manufacturers, by the excitation with a disproportionate luxury, by the rise in the wage rate, by major attacks skilfully carried to the sources of the production. I do not need to develop these ideas, you feel with wonder in which circumstances and under which pretexts all that can be done. The interest of the people, and even a kind of zeal for freedom, for the great economic principles, will cover easily, if it is wanted, the true goal. It is useless to add that the perpetual maintenance with a formidable army unceasingly exerted by external wars must be the essential complement of this system; it should be arrived so that there are more, in the State, that proletarians, some millionaires and soldiers.

MONTESQUIEU.

Continue.

MACHIAVEL.

Here is for the domestic policy of the State. Outside it is necessary to excite, of an end of Europe to the other, the revolutionary fermentation which one compresses at home. It results two considerable advantages from them: liberal agitation with the outside makes pass on the compression of the inside. Moreover, one holds by there in Doutes respect the powers, at which one can with his liking to make order or disorder. The great point is to tangle up by intrigues of cabinet all wire of the European policy in order to play in turn the powers with which one treats. Do not believe only this duplicity, if it is well supported, can turn to the detriment of a sovereign. Alexandre VI never made that to mislead in his diplomatic negotiations and however, it succeeds always, so much it had the science of the easy way [5]. But in what you call today the official language, one needs a striking contrast, and there one could not affect too much spirit of honesty and conciliation; the people which see only the appearance of the things, will make a reputation of wisdom to the sovereign who will be able to act thus.

Any interior agitation, it must be able to answer by an external war; with any imminent revolution, by a general war; but like, in policy, the words should not never agree with the acts, it is necessary that, in these various economic situations, the prince is enough skilful to disguise his true intentions under contrary intentions; it must always seem to yield to the pressure of the opinion when it carries out what its hand secretly prepared.

To summarize of a word all the system, the revolution is contained in the State, on a side, by the terror of anarchy, other, by the bankruptcy, and, with all to take, by the general war.

You could see already, by the fast indications which I have just given you, which important role the art of the word has to play in the modern policy. I am far, as you will see it, scorning the press, and I would know with the need to serve to me as the platform; essence is to employ against its adversaries all the weapons which they could use against you. Nonglad to support me on the violent force of the democracy, I would like to borrow from subtleties of the right their most erudite resources. When one makes decisions which can appear unjust or bold, it is essential to know to state them in good terms, to support them the highest reasons of morals and right.

The capacity that I dream, well far, as you see it, having cruel manners, must attract with him all the forces and all the talents of the civilization within which it lives. It will have to be surrounded publicity agents, lawyers, jurisconsults, men of practice and administration, people who know thoroughly all the secrecies, all the springs of the social life, which speak all the languages, which studied the man in all the mediums. They should be taken everywhere, anywhere, because these people-there render services astonishing by the clever processes which they apply to the policy. One needs, with that, a whole world of economists, bankers, industrialists, capitalists, men with projects, men to million, because all at the bottom will be solved by a question of figures.

As for principal dignities, with the principal dismemberments of the capacity, one must arrange oneself to give them to men whose antecedents and character put an abyss between them and the other men, of which each one has to await only death or the exile in the event of change of government and is in the need for defending to the last breath all that is.

Suppose for one moment that I have at my disposal the various resources morals and material that I have just indicated to you, and give maintaining an unspecified nation to me, hear you! You look like the most important point, in the SPIRIT OF the LAWS, not to change the character of a nation [6] when one wants to preserve his original strength to him, eh well, I would not ask you twenty years to transform in the most complete way the European character most untameable and to make it as flexible totyranny as that of the smallest people of Asia. MONTESQUIEU.

You have just added, by playing you, a chapter with the treaty of the Prince. Whatever your doctrines, I do not discuss them; I make you only one observation. It is obvious that you by no means kept to the commitment which you had taken; the use of all these means supposes the existence of the absolute capacity, and I asked you precisely how you could establish it in political companies which rest on liberal institutions.

MACHIAVEL.

Your observation is perfectly right and I do not intend to escape from it. This beginning was only one foreword.

MONTESQUIEU.

I put to you in the presence of a State based on representative institutions, monarchy or republic; I speak to you about a familiarized nation of long hand with freedom, and I ask you, how, from there, you will be able to turn over to the absolute capacity.

MACHIAVEL.

Nothing is easy any more.

MONTESQUIEU.

Let us see?

LEFT IIe.

EIGHTH DIALOGUE.

MACHIAVEL.

I adopt the approach which is most contrary for me, I take a State made up in republic. With a monarchy, the role that I propose to play would be too easy. I seemingly take a Republic, because with the similar shape of government, I will meet a resistance, almost insurmountable, in the ideas, manners, the laws. This assumption T it opposes you? I accept your hands a State whatever his form, large or small, I suppose it equipped with all the institutions which guarantee freedom, and I address this only question to you: Do you believe the capacity safe from a blow of hand or what one calls today a coup d'etat?

MONTESQUIEU.

Not, that is true; but you will grant to me at least that such acompany will be singularly difficult in the contemporary political companies, such as they are organized.

MACHIAVEL.

And why? Aren't these companies they not, like from time immemorial, in prey with factions? There are no everywhere elements of civil war, parties, applicants?

MONTESQUIEU.

It is possible; but I believe capacity to make you feel a word where is your error. These usurpations, necessarily very-rare because they are full with dangers and that they are repugnant to modern manners, by supposing that they succeed, would not by no means have the importance which you appear to allot to them. A change of being able would not bring by a change of institutions. An applicant will disturb the State, that is to say; its party will triumph, I admit it; the capacity is in other hands, here all; but the public law and the bottom even of the institutions remain of balance. It is there what touches me.

MACHIAVEL.

Is it true that you have such an illusion?

MONTESQUIEU.

Establish the opposite.

MACHIAVEL.

You thus grant to me, for one moment, the success of a company armed against the established capacity?

MONTESQUIEU.

Yes.

MACHIAVEL.

Notice well then in which situation I am placed. I removed all temporarily to be able other that mine. If the institutions still upright can raise in front of me some obstacle, it is of pure form; in fact, the acts of my will cannot meet any real resistance; finally I am under this extra-legal condition, that the Romans called of a so beautiful word and so strongly energetic: dictatorship. I.e. I then all that I want at the hour present, which I am a legislator, executor, dispenser of justice, and with horse as chief of army.

Retain this. Now I triumphed by the support over a faction, i.e. this event could be achieved only in the middle of one deep interior dissension. One can say randomly, but without beingmistaken, which are the causes. It will be an antagonism between the aristocracy and the people or the people and the middle-class. For the bottom of the things, it can be only that; on the surface, it will be one p.le-mixes with ideas, opinions, influences and reverse currents, as in all the States where freedom will have been one moment unchained. There will be political elements of any species, sections of formerly victorious parties, now overcome, unrestrained ambitions, burning covetousnesses, hatreds relentless, terrors everywhere, men of any opinion and any doctrines, restorers of Ancien R.gime, demagogues, anarchists, utopians, all with work, all also working on their side to the inversion of the established order. What is necessary to conclude from such a situation? Two things: the first, it is that the country has a great need for rest and that it will not refuse anything to which will be able to give him; the second, it is that in the middle of this division of the parties, there is real force or rather than there is only one of them, the people.

I am, me, a victorious applicant; I carry, I suppose, a historical great name suitable to act on the imagination of the masses. Like Pisistrate, C.sar, N.ron even; I will be pressed on the people; it is A B C of any usurper. It is there the blind power which will give the means of doing everything with impunity, it is there the authority, it is there the name which will cover all. The people indeed are concerned well about your legal fictions and your constitutional guarantees!

I made silence in the middle of the factions, and now you will see as I will walk.

Perhaps you remember the rules that I established in the treaty of the Prince to preserve the conquered provinces. The usurper of a State is in a situation similar to that of a conqueror. It is condemned to all to renew, to dissolve the State, to destroy the city, to change the face of manners.

It is the goal there, but in current times one should for it tend only by oblique ways, diverted means, combinations skilful, and, as much as possible, free from violence. I will thus not destroy directly the institutions, but I will touch them with one by an unperceived feature of hand which will disturb the mechanism of it. Thus I will touch in turn with the legal organization, the vote, the press, the personal freedom, teaching.

Over the primitive laws I will make pass a whole new legislation which, without repealing the old one expressly, will mask it initially, then soon will erase it compl.tement. Such are my general designs, now you will see the details of execution.

MONTESQUIEU.

How do not be you still in the gardens of Ruccella., . Machiavel, to profess these beautiful lessons, and how much it isregrettable that the posterity cannot hear you!

MACHIAVEL.

You reassure; for which can read, all that is in the treaty of the Prince.

MONTESQUIEU.

Eh well, you the shortly after your coup d'etat, which will you are make?

MACHIAVEL.

A large thing, then very-small.

MONTESQUIEU.

Let us see initially the large one?

MACHIAVEL.

After the success of a takeover by force against the established capacity, all is not finished, and the parties are generally not held for not beaten. One does not know yet with the Juste what the energy of the usurper is worth, one will test it, one will rise against him the weapons to the hand. The moment had just printed a terror which strikes the whole city and makes weaken the most intrepid hearts.

MONTESQUIEU.

What will you make? You had said to me that you had repudiated blood.

MACHIAVEL.

It is not a question here of false humanity. The company is threatened, it is in a state of self-defence; the excess of the rigours and even of cruelty will prevent for the future of new bloodsheds. Do not ask me what one will do; it is necessary that the hearts are terrified once and for all and that fear softening.

MONTESQUIEU.

Yes, I remember; it is there what you teach in the treaty of the Prince by telling it sinister execution of Borgia in C.s.ne [7]. You are well the same one. MACHIAVEL.

Not, not, you will see it later; I acted like by need, and I suffer from it.

MONTESQUIEU.

But which thus will pour it, this blood?

MACHIAVEL.

The army! this large retributive of the States; it whose hand never dishonours its victims. Two results of the greattest importance will be reached by the intervention of the army in repression. From this moment, on the one hand it will be for always in hostility with the civil population which it will have punished without care, other it will be attached in an insoluble way to the fate of its chief.

MONTESQUIEU.

And you believe that this blood will not fall down on you?

MACHIAVEL.

Not, because with the eyes of the people, the sovereign, ultimately, is foreign with excesses of an army rabble which it is not always easy to contain. Those which could of it be responsible, they will be the Generals, the ministers who will have carried out my orders. These, I affirm it to you, will be devoted for me until their last sigh, because they know well what would await them after me.

MONTESQUIEU.

It is thus there your first act of sovereignty! Let us see the second now?

MACHIAVEL.

I do not know if you noticed which is, in policy, the power of the small means. After what I have just said to you, I will make strike with my effigy all the new currency, of which I will emit a considerable quantity.

MONTESQUIEU.

But in the middle of the first concern of the State, it would be a puerile measurement.

MACHIAVEL.

You believe that? You did not practise the capacity. The human effigy printed on the currency, it is the sign even of the power. With the first access there will be proud spirits which will tressailliront some of anger, but one will be accustomed to it; the same enemies of my capacity will be obliged to have my portrait in their escarcelle. It is quite certain that one is accustomed little by little to look with softer eyes the featureswho are printed everywhere on the material sign of our pleasures. Day when my effigy is on the currency, I am a king.

MONTESQUIEU.

I acknowledge that this outline is new for me; but let us pass. You did not forget that the new people have the weakness to give each other constitutions which are the guarantees of their rights? With your capacity resulting from the force, with the projects that you reveal me, you perhaps will find you embarrassed in the presence of a fundamental charter of which all the principles, all the rules, all the provisions are contrary with your maxims of government.

MACHIAVEL.

I will make another constitution, here all.

MONTESQUIEU.

And you think that that will not be differently difficult?

MACHIAVEL.

Where would be the difficulty? There is not, for the moment, of another will, another force that mine and I have as a base of action the popular element.

MONTESQUIEU.

It is true. I however have a scruple: according to what you have just said to me, I imagine that your constitution will not be a monument of freedom. You think that it will be enough to only one crisis of the force, of only one happy violence to charm with a nation all its rights, all its conquests, all its institutions, all the principles with which it took the practice to live?

MACHIAVEL.

Allow! I do not go so quickly. I said to you, few moments ago, that the people were like the men, that they were due more to appearances than with reality of the things; it is there, in policy, a rule of which I would follow the indications scrupulously; please point out the principles to me to which you hold more and you will see that I am not as embarrassed by it as you appear to believe it.

MONTESQUIEU.

What will you make some, . Machiavel?

MACHIAVEL.

Do not fear anything, name the-me. MONTESQUIEU.

I does not trust it, I acknowledge it to you.

MACHIAVEL.

Eh well, I will point out them to you myself. You would undoubtedly not fail to speak to me about the principle of the separation of the capacities, of the freedom of the word and the press, religious freedom, the personal freedom, the right of association, the equality in front of the law, the inviolability of the property and the residence, the right of petition, the free assent of the tax, the proportionality of the sorrows, nonthe retroactivity of the laws; in is this enough and you wish some still?

MONTESQUIEU.

I believe that it is much more than one should not any, Machiavel, to badly put your government at ease.

MACHIAVEL.

It is there what misleads you, and that is so true, which I do not see no disadvantage to proclaim these principles; I will even make some, if you want it, the preamble to my constitution.

MONTESQUIEU.

You already proved to me that you were a large magician.

MACHIAVEL.

There is magic there inside, it is only political know-how.

MONTESQUIEU.

But how, having registered these principles at the head your constitution, you will take there you not to apply them?

MACHIAVEL.

Ah! take guard, I said to you that I would proclaim these principles, but I did not say to you that I would even register them nor as I would indicate them expressly.

MONTESQUIEU.

How do you hear it?

MACHIAVEL.

I would not enter any recapitulation; I would restrict myself to declare with the people which I recognize and which I confirm thegreat principles of the modern right.

MONTESQUIEU.

The range of this reserve escapes to me.

MACHIAVEL.

You will recognize how much it is important. If I enumerated these rights expressly, my liberty of action would be connected with respect to those which I would have declared; it is what I do not want. By not naming them, I appear to grant them all and I do not grant of it especially any; that will enable me later to draw aside, by way of exception, those which I will consider dangerous.

MONTESQUIEU.

I include/understand.

MACHIAVEL.

Among these principles, moreover, the ones belong to the political and constitutional right itself, the others with the civil law. It is there a distinction which must always be used as rule in the exercise of the absolute capacity. It is with their civil laws that the people hold more; I will not touch there, if I then, and, in this manner, part of my program at least will be filled.

MONTESQUIEU.

And as for the political rightsà?

MACHIAVEL.

I wrote in the treaty of the Prince the maxim that here, and who did not cease being true: "Controlled will be always content with the prince, when it touches neither with their goods, nor with their honor, and consequently it does not have to fight any more that claims of a small number of dissatisfied, from which it comes easily to end." My answer to your question is there.

MONTESQUIEU.

One could, with the rigour, not to find it sufficient; one could answer you that the political rights also are goods; that it is important also with the honor of the people to maintain them, and that in there touching you actually carry reached to their goods as to their honor. One could still add that the maintenance of the civil laws is related to the maintenance of the political rights by a narrow solidarity. Who will guarantee the citizens that if you strip them today political freedom, you will not strip them tomorrow personal freedom; what if you make an attempttoday on their freedom, you will not make an attempt tomorrow on their fortune?

MACHIAVEL.

It is certain that the argument is presented with much promptness, but I believe that you include/understand of it perfectly also the exaggeration. You always seem to believe that the modern people are famished of freedom. Did you envisage the case where they do not want any more, and can you ask the princes to have for it more passion than the people do not have any? However, in your companies so deeply slackened, where the individual did not see any more that in the sphere of its selfishness and its material interests, question the greatest number, and you will see whether, on all sides, one does not answer you: What makes me the policy? what imports me freedom? Aren't all the governments the same ones? shouldn't a government be defended?

Notice it, moreover, it is not even the people which will speak this language; they will be the middle-class men, the industrialists, educated people, the rich person, the well-read men, all those which are in a position to appreciate your beautiful doctrines of public law. They will bless me, they will exclaim that I saved them, that they are in a state of minority, that they are unable to act. Hold, the nations have I do not know which secrecy love for the vigorous geniuses of the force. All the acts violent ones marked of the talent of the artifice, you will intend to say with an admiration which will overcome the blame: It is not well, that is to say, but it is skilful, it is well played, it is strong!

MONTESQUIEU.

You thus will return in the professional part of your doctrines?

MACHIAVEL.

Not, we are with the execution. I would certainly have taken some steps moreover if you had not obliged me with a digression. Let us begin again.     

NINTH DIALOGUE.

MONTESQUIEU.

You were the shortly after a constitution made by you without the approval of the nation.

MACHIAVEL.

Here I stop you; I never claimed froisser at this point of thegenerally accepted ideas of which I know the empire.

MONTESQUIEU.

Really!

MACHIAVEL.

I speak tr.s-s.rieusement.

MONTESQUIEU.

You thus hope to associate the nation new works fundamental that you prepare?

MACHIAVEL.

Yes, undoubtedly. Does that astonish you? I will do well better: I will initially make ratify by the popular vote the takeover by force which I achieved against the State; I will say to the people, in the terms which will be appropriate: All went badly; I very, I saved you, do you want broke ego? you are free to condemn me or to exonerate me by your vote.

MONTESQUIEU.

Free under the weight of terror and the armed force.

MACHIAVEL.

Me will be acclaimed.

MONTESQUIEU.

I believe it.

MACHIAVEL.

And the popular vote, of which I made the instrument of my capacity, will become the base even of my government. I will establish a vote without reference to class nor of taxable quota, with which the absolutism will be organized of only one blow.

MONTESQUIEU.

Yes, because of only one blow you break at the same time the unit of the family, you depreciate the vote, you cancel the preponderance of the lights and you make number a blind power which moves to your liking.

MACHIAVEL.

I make a progress to which today all the people of Europe aspire ardently: I organize the vote for all like Washington in theUnited States, and the first use that I make some is to subject my constitution to him.

MONTESQUIEU.

What! you will make it discuss in primary or secondary assemblies?

MACHIAVEL.

Oh! let us leave there, I request from you, your ideas of the XVIIIe century; they are not already any more of time present.

MONTESQUIEU.

Eh well, how then will you make deliberate on acceptance on your constitution? how the organic articles will be discussed by it?

MACHIAVEL.

But I do not hear that they are discussed of the whole, I believed to have said it to you.

MONTESQUIEU.

I did nothing but follow you on the ground of the principles that you liked it to choose. You spoke to me about the United States of America; I do not know if you are new Washington, but what there is of some, it is that the current constitution of the United States was discussed, deliberated and voted by the representatives of the nation.

MACHIAVEL.

Of grace, let us not confuse times, the places and the people: we are in Europe; my constitution is presented in block, it is accepted in block.

MONTESQUIEU.

But while thus acting you do not disguise anything for anybody. How, as a voter under these conditions, the people can it know what it does and up to which point it engages?

MACHIAVEL.

And where you ever saw that a constitution really worthy of this name, really durable, ever was the result of a popular deliberation? A constitution must leave very armed with the head only one man or it is only one work condemned to nothing. Without homogeneity, without connection in its parts, practical force, it will carry necessarily the print of all the weaknesses of sights which governed its drafting.

A constitution, once again, can be only the work of one; never the things occurred differently, I attest of it the history of all the founders of empire, the example of S.sostris, Solon, Lycurgue, Charlemagne, the Frederic II, Pierre Ist.

MONTESQUIEU.

It is a chapter of one of your disciples whom you will develop me there.

MACHIAVEL.

And of which thus?

MONTESQUIEU.

Of Joseph de Maistre. There are general considerations which are not without truth, but that I find without application. One would say, to hear you, that you will draw people from chaos or major night of his first origins. You do not appear you to remember only, on the assumption that we place ourselves, the nation reached the apogee of its civilization, that its public law is founded, and that it is in possession of regular institutions.

MACHIAVEL.

I do not say not; as you will see as I do not need to destroy basic in roof your institutions to arrive at my goal. It will be enough for me to modify the economy of it and to change the combinations them.

MONTESQUIEU.

Do you explain?

MACHIAVEL.

You made me a course of constitutional policy a few moments ago, I hope to make it profitable. I am not, moreover, as foreign as one generally believes it in Europe, with all these ideas of political rocker; you could see you by my speeches on Tite-Live. But let us return to the fact. You noticed with reason, one moment ago, that in the parliamentary States of Europe the authorities were distributed about everywhere same manner between a certain number of bodies politic whose regular play constituted the government.

Thus one finds everywhere, under various names, but with about uniform attributions, a ministerial organization, a senate, a legislative body, a Council of State, a supreme court of appeal; I must make you grace of any useless development on the respective mechanism of these capacities, of which you know better than me the secrecy; it is obvious that each one of them answers an essential function of the government. You will noticewell that it is the function that I call essential, it is not the institution. Thus is needed that there is a capacity directing, a moderating capacity, a legislative power, a regulatory capacity, that is not a doubt.

MONTESQUIEU.

But, if I include/understand you well, these various capacities make of them only one in your eyes and you will give all that to only one man by removing the institutions.

MACHIAVEL.

Once again, it is what misleads you. One could not act thus without danger. One could not especially it on your premise, with the fanaticism which reigns there for what you call the principles of 89; but please listen to me well: In statics the displacement of a point of support makes change the direction of the force, in mechanics the displacement of a spring makes change the movement. Seemingly however it is the same apparatus, it is the same mechanism. In the same way still in physiology the temperament depends on the state of the bodies. If the bodies are modified, the temperament changes. Eh well, the various institutions from which we come to speak function in the governmental economy like true bodies in the human body. I will touch with the bodies, the bodies will remain, but the political complexing of the State will be changed. Do you conceive?

MONTESQUIEU.

It is not difficult, and periphrases were not needed. You keep the names, you remove the things. It is what Auguste did in Rome when it destroyed the Republic. There was always a consulate, a pr.ture, a censure, a tribunat; but there were neither consuls no more, neither praetors, neither critics, nor powerful orators.

MACHIAVEL.

Acknowledge that one can choose worse models. All can be made in policy, in the condition of flattering the public prejudices and of keeping respect for appearances.

MONTESQUIEU.

Do not return in the general information; you here is with work, I am to you.

MACHIAVEL.

Do not forget to which personal convictions each one of my acts will take its source. In my eyes your parliamentary governments are only schools of argument, that sterile hearths of agitations in the medium of which the fertile activity of the nations becomes exhausted that the platform and the press condemn to theimpotence. Consequently I do not have a remorse; I start from a high point of view and my goal justifies my acts.

With abstract theories I substitute the reason practises, the experiment of the centuries, the example of the men of genius who made large things by the same means; I start by returning to the capacity his vital conditions.

My first reform dwells too long immediately on your alleged ministerial responsibility. In the countries of centralization, like yours, for example, where the opinion, by an instinctive feeling, brings back all to the Head of the State, the good like the evil, to at the head register charter which the sovereign is irresponsible, it is to lie to the public feeling, it is to establish a fiction which will always disappear with the noise of the revolutions.

I thus start by striping of my constitution the principle of the ministerial responsibility; the sovereign that I institute will be only responsible in front of the people.

MONTESQUIEU.

Per good hour, there is no there ambages.

MACHIAVEL.

In your parliamentary system, the representatives of the nation have, as you explained it to me, the initiative of the bills alone or jointly executive power; eh well, it is the source of the most serious abuses, bus in a similar order of things, each deputy can, with any matter, to replace the government by presenting the least studied bills, thorough; what do I say? with the parliamentary initiative, the Room will reverse, when she wants, the government. I raye the parliamentary initiative. The proposal of the laws will belong only to the sovereign.

MONTESQUIEU.

I see that you enter by the best way the career of the absolute capacity; because in a State where the initiative of the laws belongs only to the sovereign, it is about the sovereign who is the only legislator; but before you do not combine further, I would wish to make you an objection. You want to strengthen yourselves on the rock, and I find you sitted on sand.

MACHIAVEL.

How?

MONTESQUIEU.

Didn't you take the popular vote for base of your capacity?

MACHIAVEL.

Undoubtedly.

MONTESQUIEU.

Eh well, you are only one revocable agent with the liking of the people, in which only reside true sovereignty. You believed to be able to make be used this principle for the maintenance of your authority, you thus do not realize that you will be reversed when one will want? In addition, you declared yourselves only person in charge; you thus hope to be an angel? But be it if you want, one will not be caught any less with you of all the evil which will be able to arrive, and you will perish with the first crisis.

MACHIAVEL.

You anticipate: the objection comes too early, but I answer it of continuation, since you force me there. You are mistaken curiously if you believe that I did not envisage the argument. If my capacity were disturbed, it could be only by factions. I am kept against them by two essential rights that I put in my constitution.

MONTESQUIEU.

Which are thus these rights?

MACHIAVEL.

The call to the people, right to put the country in a state of si.ge; I am a chief of army, I have all the police force between the hands; with the first insurrection against my capacity, the bayonets would make me reason of resistance and I would find in the popular ballot box a new dedication of my authority.

MONTESQUIEU.

You have arguments without counterpart; but let us return, I request from you, with the legislative Body which you installed; on this point, I do not see you out of embarrassment; you deprived this assembly of the parliamentary initiative, but there remains to him the right to vote the laws which you will present at his adoption. You undoubtedly do not hope to let to him exert?

MACHIAVEL.

You are ombrageux than me, because I acknowledge you that I do not see with that any disadvantage. No one other that myself not being able to present the law, I do not have to fear that it is done any against my capacity of it. I have the key of the gate vault. As I said it besides to you, it enters my plans to let remain seemingly the institutions. Only I must declare you that Ido not intend to leave with the Room what you call the right of amendment. It is obvious that with the exercise of such a faculty, it is not law which could not be deviated of its primitive goal and whose economy was not likely to be changed. The law is accepted or rejected, there is not an other alternative.

MONTESQUIEU.

But one would not have any more to reverse you: it would be enough for that that the legislative assembly systematically pushed back all your bills or only which she refused to vote the tax.

MACHIAVEL.

You know perfectly that the things cannot occur thus. A room, whatever it is, which would block by such an act of temerity the movement of the public affairs would commit suicide itself. I would have thousand means of neutralizing besides the capacity of such an assembly. I would reduce half the number of the representatives and I would have, consequently, half less political passions to fight. I would reserve the appointment of the presidents and the vice-presidents who direct the deliberations. Instead of permanent sessions, I would reduce to a few months the behaviour of the assembly. I would make especially a thing which is of very-large importance, and whose practice already starts to be introduced, has one says me: I would abolish the exemption from payment of the legislative mandate; I would like that the deputies received an emolument, that their functions were, to some extent, paid. I look at this innovation like the surest means attaching to the capacity the representatives of the nation; I do not need to develop you that, the effectiveness of the means includes myself/understands enough. I add that, as chief of the executive power, I have the right to convene, to dissolve the legislative Body, and that in the event of dissolution, I would reserve the longest times to convene a new representation. I include/understand perfectly that the legislative assembly could not, without danger, to remain independent of my capacity, but reassure you: we will meet soon other means practise to attach it to it. Are these constitutional details enough for you? in do you want more?

MONTESQUIEU.

That is by no means necessary and you can pass now to the organization of the Senate.

MACHIAVEL.

I see that you have tr.s-bien understood that it was there the capital part of my work, the keystone of my constitution.

MONTESQUIEU. I do not know really what you can still do, because, as of now, I compl.tement look you like main State.

MACHIAVEL.

You like that to say; but, actually, sovereignty could not be established on such surface bases. Beside the sovereign, one needs imposing bodies by the glare of the titles, dignities and by the personal illustration of those which make it up. It is not good that the person of the sovereign is constantly concerned, that its hand always realizes; it is necessary that its action can with the need to cover itself under the authority of the great magistratures which surround the throne.

MONTESQUIEU.

It is easy to see that it is with this role that you intend the Senate and the Council of State.

MACHIAVEL.

One can nothing hide you.

MONTESQUIEU.

You speak about the throne: I see that you are a king and we were a few moments ago in republic. The transition is hardly spared.

MACHIAVEL.

The famous French publicity agent cannot ask me to stop with similar details of execution: since I have the absolute power in hand, the hour when I will be made proclaim king is nothing any more but one business of opportunity. I will be it before or after having promulgated my constitution, it does not matter.

MONTESQUIEU.

It is true. Let us return to the organization of the Senate.

TENTH DIALOGUE.

MACHIAVEL.

In the high studies which you had to make for the composition of your memorable work on the Causes of the size and the decline of the Romans, it is not that you did not notice the part which the Senate near the Emperors starting from the reign of Auguste played.

MONTESQUIEU.

It is there, if you allow me to say it to you, a point which historical research does not appear to me still compl.tement to have cleared up. What there is of some, it is that until last times of the Republic, the Romain Senate had been an autonomous institution, invested immense privil.ges, having clean capacities; it was there the secrecy of its power, depth of its political traditions and the size which it printed with the Republic. Starting from Auguste, the Senate is not any more that one instrument in the hand of the emperors, but one does not see well by which succession of acts they managed to strip it his power.

MACHIAVEL.

It is not precisely to elucidate this point of history that I ask you to refer to this period of the Empire. This question, for the moment, does not worry me; all that I wanted to say to you, it is that the Senate that I conceive should fill, beside the prince, a political role similar to that of the Romain Senate in times which followed the fall of the Republic.

MONTESQUIEU.

Eh well, but at that time the law was not voted any more in the popular comices, it was made with blows senatus consults; is this that which you want?

MACHIAVEL.

Not: that would not be in conformity with the modern principles of the constitutional law.

MONTESQUIEU.

What a remerc.ments does not owe you one for a similar scruple!

MACHIAVEL.

I do not need that besides to enact what appears necessary to me. Null legislative provision, you know it, can emanate only from my proposal, and besides I make decrees which have the force of laws.

MONTESQUIEU.

It is true, you had forgotten this point, which is however not mean; but then I do not see at which ends you reserve the Senate.

MACHIAVEL.

Placed in the constitutional higher realms, its direct intervention should appear only in solemn circumstances; if it were necessary, for example, to touch with the fundamental pact, or that sovereignty was put in danger. MONTESQUIEU.

This language is still tr.s-divinatoire. You like to prepare your effects.

MACHIAVEL.

The obsession of your modern components was, until now, to want all to envisage, all to regulate in the charters which they give to the people. I would not fall into such a fault; I would not like to lock up me in an insuperable circle; I would fix only what it is impossible to leave dubious; I would leave with the changes a rather broad way so that there are, in the great crises, other means of hello that disastrous revolutions dispatch it.

MONTESQUIEU.

You speak into wise.

MACHIAVEL.

And with regard to the Senate, I would register in my constitution: "That the Senate regulates, by a senatus consult, all that was not envisaged by the constitution and which is necessary to its walk; that it fixes the direction of the articles of the constitution which would give place to various interpretations; that it maintains or cancels all the acts which are submitted to him like unconstitutional by the government or are denounced by the petitions of the citizens; that it can pose the bases of bills of a great national interest; that it can propose modifications with the constitution and that it will be ruled there by a senatus consult."

MONTESQUIEU.

All that is extremely beautiful and it is a Romain Senate truly there. I make only some remarks on your constitution: it will be thus written in terms well vague and well ambiguous so that you judge in advance which the articles that it contains could be likely various interpretations.

MACHIAVEL.

Not, but it is necessary all to envisage.

MONTESQUIEU.

I believed that, on the contrary, your principle, in similar matter, was to avoid all envisaging and all to regulate.

MACHIAVEL.

The famous president did not haunt without profit the palate ofTh.mis, nor unnecessarily worn the bonnet with mortar. My words had of another range only this one: It is necessary to envisage what is essential.

MONTESQUIEU.

Say to me, I request from you: your Senate, interprets and guard of the fundamental pact, thus have does a clean capacity?

MACHIAVEL.

Undoubtedly not.

MONTESQUIEU.

All that will do the Senate, they will be thus you who will do it?

MACHIAVEL.

I do not tell you the opposite.

MONTESQUIEU.

What it will interpret, they will be thus you who will interpret it; what it will modify, it will be you who will modify it; will what it cancel, it will be you who will cancel it?

MACHIAVEL.

I do not claim to defend me.

MONTESQUIEU.

What it will interpret, they will be thus you who will interpret it; what it will modify, it will be you who will modify it; will what it cancel, it will be you who will cancel it?

MACHIAVEL.

I do not claim to defend me.

MONTESQUIEU.

They is thus with saying that you reserve yourselves the right to demolish what you did, to remove what you gave, to change your constitution, either in good, or in evil, or to even make it disappear compl.tement if you consider it necessary. I do not prejudge anything of your intentions nor of the mobiles which could make you act in such or such circumstances given; I ask you only where would be the weakest guarantee for the citizens in the middle of so vast arbitrary, and how especially they could never be solved to undergo it?

MACHIAVEL.

I realize that the philosophical sensitivity returns to you. You reassure, I would not make any modification to the fundamental bases of my Constitution without subjecting these modifications to the acceptance of the people by the way of the vote for all.

MONTESQUIEU.

But they would be still you who would be a judge of the question of knowing if the modification that you project door in it the fundamental character which must subject it to the sanction of the people. I want to admit however that you will not make by a decree or a senatus consult what must be made by a plebiscite. Will you deliver to the discussion your constitutional amendments? will you make them deliberate in popular comices?

MACHIAVEL.

Incontestably not; if ever the debate on constitutional articles were committed before popular assemblies, nothing could prevent the people from seizing examination of the whole under the terms of its right of evocation, and the following day it would be the Revolution in the street.

MONTESQUIEU.

You are logical at least: then are the constitutional amendments presented in block, accepted in block?

MACHIAVEL.

Not differently, indeed.

MONTESQUIEU.

Eh well, I believe that we can pass to the organization of the Council of State.

MACHIAVEL.

You direct really the debates with the consumed precision of a President of sovereign court. I forgot to say to you that I would sharpen the Senate as I sharpened the legislative Body.

MONTESQUIEU.

It is heard.

MACHIAVEL.

I do not need to add besides that I would also reserve the appointment of the Presidents and the Vice-presidents of this high assembly. In what touches the Council of State, I will beshorter. Your modern institutions are so powerful instruments of centralization, which it is almost impossible to make use of it without exerting the sovereign authority.

What is this, indeed, according to your own principles, which the Council of State? It is show of body politic intended to make to pass between hands from Prince capacity considerable, capacity regulatory which is a kind of discr.tionnaire capacity, which can be used, when one wants, to make true laws.

The Council of State moreover is invested on your premise, has one says me, of a special attribution perhaps more exorbitant still. In the contentious field, it can, ensures me one, to assert by right of evocation, to seize again its own authority, in front of the ordinary courts, the knowledge of all the litigations which appear to him to be administrative. Thus, and to characterize in a word what there is the completely exceptional one in this last attribution, the courts must refuse to judge when they are in the presence of an act of the administrative authority, and the administrative authority can, in the same case, to deprive the courts to refer about it to the Council Decision of State.

However, once again, what the Council of State? Does it have a clean capacity? is it independent of the sovereign? At all. It is only one Editorial board. When the Council of State makes a payment, it is the sovereign who does it; when it gives a judgement, it is the sovereign who returns it, or, like you say today, it is the administration, the administration judges and left in its own cause. Do you know something moreover more extremely than that and believe you that there is to make much to found the absolute capacity in States where one finds very organized similar institutions?

MONTESQUIEU.

Your criticism falls rather right, I am appropriate about it; but, as the Council of State is an excellent institution in oneself, nothing is not easier than to give him independence necessary by insulating it, in a certain measurement, capacity. It is not what you will undoubtedly do.

MACHIAVEL.

Indeed, I will maintain the type of the unit in the institution where I will find it, I will bring back it where it is not, by reinforcing the links of a solidarity which I look like essential.

We did not remain in way, you see it, because here is my made constitution.

MONTESQUIEU.

Already?

MACHIAVEL.

A small number of learnedly ordered combinations is enough to change the walk of the capacities compl.tement. This part of my program is filled.

MONTESQUIEU.

I believed that you had still to speak to me about the supreme court of appeal.

MACHIAVEL.

What I have with you to say will find its place better elsewhere.

MONTESQUIEU.

It is true that if we evaluate the sum of the capacities which are between your hands, you must start to be satisfied.

Let us recapitulate:

You make the law: 1. in the form of proposals to the legislative Body; you do it, 2., in the form of decrees; 3. in the form of senatus consults; 4. in the form of general payments; 5. in the form of decrees with the Council of State; 6. in the form of ministerial payments; 7. finally in the form of coups d'etat.

MACHIAVEL.

You do not appear to suspect only what remains me to be achieved is precisely most difficult.

MONTESQUIEU.

Indeed, I did not suspect it.

MACHIAVEL.

You did not notice enough whereas my constitution was dumb on a crowd of acquired rights which would be incompatible with the new order of things that I have just established. It is thus, for example, of, right of association, the independence freedom of the press of the magistrature, the right of vote, the election, by the communes, their officers municipal, institution of the civic guards and much of other things still which will have to disappear or to be deeply modified.

MONTESQUIEU.

But didn't you recognize all these rights implicitly, since you solemnly recognized the principles of which they are only theapplication?

MACHIAVEL.

I said it to you, I did not recognize any principle nor no right in particular; furthermore, measurements which I will take are only departures from the rule.

MONTESQUIEU.

And of the exceptions which confirm it, it is right.

MACHIAVEL.

But, for that, I must choose my moment well, because an error of opportunity can all lose. I wrote in the treaty of the Prince a maxim which must be used as code of conduct in such a case: "Is needed that the usurper of a State there only once makes all the rigours which its safety requires not to have to return there more; because later it will be able to vary any more with its subjects neither in good nor in evil; if it is in evil that you have to act, you are not any more in time, of the moment when fortune is contrary for you; if it is in good, your subjects will know you no liking of a change which they will consider forced being."

The shortly even after the promulgation of my constitution, I will return a succession of decrees having the force of law, which will remove of only one blow freedoms and the rights whose exercise would be dangerous.

MONTESQUIEU.

The moment is quite indeed selected. The country is still under the terror of your coup d'etat. For your constitution one nothing refused you, since you could all take; for your decrees there is nothing to allow you, since you do not ask anything and that you take all.

MACHIAVEL.

You have the sharp word.

MONTESQUIEU.

A little less however than you have the action, agree. In spite of your strength of hand and your glance, I acknowledge you that I have sorrow to believe that the country will not be raised in the presence of this second coup d'etat held in reserve behind the slide.

MACHIAVEL.

The country will voluntarily close the eyes; because, on theassumption that I placed myself, it is tired of agitations, it aspires at rest as the sand of the desert after the heavy shower which follows the storm.

MONTESQUIEU.

You make with that of beautiful rhetorical figures; it too is.

MACHIAVEL.

Besides I hasten to say to you that freedoms which I remove, I will solemnly promise to return them after the appeasing of the parties.

MONTESQUIEU.

I believe that one will always wait.

MACHIAVEL.

It is possible.

MONTESQUIEU.

It is certain, because your maxims make it possible to the prince not to hold his word when it finds his interest there.

MACHIAVEL.

You do not hasten to pronounce; you will see the use which I will be able to make of this promise; I undertake soon to pass for the most liberal man of my kingdom.

MONTESQUIEU.

Here is an astonishment to which I am not prepared; while waiting, you remove all freedoms directly.

MACHIAVEL.

Directly is not the word of a statesman; I do not remove anything directly; it is here that the skin of the fox must be sewn with the skin of the lion. With what would be used the policy, if one could not gain by oblique ways the goal which cannot be reached by the straight line? The bases of my establishment are not posed, the forces are ready, it does not have there any more but to put them moving. I will make it with all the cares that comprise new constitutional manners. It is here that must naturally place the artifices of government and legislation which prudence recommends to the prince.

MONTESQUIEU.

I see that we enter a new phase; I prepare myself to listen toyou.

ELEVENTH DIALOGUE.

MACHIAVEL.

You notice with much reason, in the Spirit of the laws, that the word of freedom is a word to which one attaches extremely various directions. , Said one, in your work, the proposal is read that here:

"Freedom is the right to do what the laws allow [8]."

I put up tr.s-bien with this definition which I find just, and I then to ensure you that my laws will allow only what it will be necessary. You will see which is the spirit. By what you do like it that we start? MONTESQUIEU.

I would not be annoyed to see initially how you will put yourselves in defense with respect to the press.

MACHIAVEL.

You put the finger, indeed, on the most delicate part of my task. The system that I conceive in this respect as vast as is multiplied in its applications. Fortunately, here, I my bent frank; I then to cut and slice in full safety and almost without raising any recrimination.

MONTESQUIEU.

Why thus, please?

MACHIAVEL.

Because, in the majority of the parliamentary countries, the press has the talent to be made hateful, because it is never with the service that violent passions, egoistic, exclusive; because it disparages of party taken, because it is venal, because it is unjust, because it is without generosity and patriotism; finally and especially, because you will never make include/understand with the great mass of a country for what it can be used.

MONTESQUIEU.

Oh! if you seek objections against the press, it will be easy for you to accumulate some. If you ask what it can be useful, it is other thing. It quite simply prevents the arbitrary one in the exercise of the capacity; it forces to control constitutionally; it constrained; with honesty, with decency, the respect of themselves and others agents of the public authority. Lastly, forany statement in a word, it gives to whoever is oppressed the means of complaining and of being heard. One can forgive much at an institution which, through so much of abuse, returns necessarily so much of services.

MACHIAVEL.

Yes, I know this plea, but make include/understand it, if you can it, with the greatest number; count those which will be interested in the fate of the press, and you will see.

MONTESQUIEU.

Therefore it is better that you pass from following the means practise to muzzle it; I believe that it is the word.

MACHIAVEL.

It is the word, indeed; furthermore, it is not only the journalism which I hear refr.ner.

MONTESQUIEU.

It is printing works itself.

MACHIAVEL.

You start to use of the irony.

MONTESQUIEU.

In one moment you will remove it to me since in all the forms you will connect the press.

MACHIAVEL.

One does not find weapons against a joviality whose feature is so spiritual; but you will understand with wonder that it would not be the sorrow to escape the attacks from journalism if it were necessary to remain in hillock with those of the book.

MONTESQUIEU.

Eh well, let us start with journalism.

MACHIAVEL.

If I warned myself to remove purely and simply the newspapers, I would run up against public susceptibility tr.s-imprudemment, that it is always dangerous to face openly; I will proceed by a series of provisions which will appear simple measurements of precaution and police force.

I issue that in the future no newspaper will be able to befounded that with the authorization of the government; here is already evil stopped in its development; because you think without sorrow which the newspapers which will be authorized in the future could be only bodies devoted to the government.

MONTESQUIEU.

But, since you go into all these details, allow: the spirit of a newspaper changes with the personnel of its drafting; how will you be able to draw aside a hostile drafting with your capacity?

MACHIAVEL.

The objection is quite weak, because, in the final analysis, I will not authorize, if I want it, the publication of any new sheet; but I have other plans, as you will see it. You ask me how I will neutralize a hostile drafting? In the simplest way, in truth; I will add that the authorization of the government is necessary at a rate of all changes operated in the personnel of the writers in chief or managers of the newspaper.

MONTESQUIEU.

But the old newspapers, remained enemy of your government and whose drafting will not have changed, will speak.

MACHIAVEL.

Oh! wait: I reach all the newspapers present or future by tax measurements which will stop as it is appropriate the companies of publicity; I will subject the political sheets so that you call today the stamp and the guarantee. The newspaper industry will be soon if not very lucrative, thanks to the rise in these taxes, that one will devote oneself to it only advisedly.

MONTESQUIEU.

The remedy is insufficient, because the political parties do not look at with the money.

MACHIAVEL.

Be quiet, I have what to close the mouth to them, because to come here repressive measurements. There are States in Europe where one submitted with the jury the knowledge of the violations of the press laws. I do not know measurement more deplorable than that one, because is to agitate the opinion in connection with least billeves.e of journalist. The violations of the press laws are so elastic, the writer can disguise his attacks in forms if varied and so subtle, that it is not even possible to submit with the courts the knowledge of these offences. The courts will remain always armed, that goes without saying, but the repressive weapon of the every day must be with the hands of the administration. MONTESQUIEU.

There will be thus offences which will not be justiciable to the courts, or rather you will thus strike with two hands: hand of the justice and that of the administration?

MACHIAVEL.

Great evil! Here is of solicitude for some bad and malicious journalists who make state all attack, all to disparage; who behave with the governments as these gangsters whom the travellers meet the escopette with the fist on their road. They are put constantly out the law; when well even one would put them at it a little!

MONTESQUIEU.

It is thus on them only that will fall your rigours?

MACHIAVEL.

I then not to engage me with that, because these people-there are like the heads of the hydre of Lerne; when one cuts ten from there, it pushes back fifty of them. It is mainly with the newspapers, as companies of publicity, that I would be caught some. I would speak simply the language to them that here: I could remove you all, I did not do it; I it then still, I let to you live, but it goes without saying it is in a condition, it is that you will not come to embarrass my walk and to discredit my capacity. I do not want to have the every day to make you lawsuits, nor to have unceasingly to comment on the law to repress your infringements; I then not more to have an army of critics charged to examine the day before what you will publish the following day. You have feathers, write; but retain this well; I reserve myself, for myself and my agents, the right to judge when I will be attacked. Not subtleties. When you attack me, I will smell it well and will smell it well to you yourselves; in this case, I will have justice of my own hands, not of continuation, because I want to put cares at it; I will inform you once, twice; with the third time I will remove you.

MONTESQUIEU.

I see with astonishment that it is not precisely the journalist who is struck in this system, it is the newspaper, whose ruin involves that of the interests which grouped around him.

MACHIAVEL.

That they will group elsewhere; one does not make trade on these things. My administration would thus strike, as I come from you the statement, without damage of course of the judgments pronounced by the courts. Two judgments in the year would involve automatically the removal of the newspaper. I would not leave itthere, I would still say to the newspapers, in a decree or in a law gets along: Reduced to narrowest circumspection in what concerns you, do not hope to agitate the opinion by comments on the debates of my rooms; I you defend of it the report, I defend you even the report of the legal debates as regards press. More do not hope to impress the public spirit by alleged news come from the outside; I would punish the false news of body sorrows, which they are published of good or insincerely.

MONTESQUIEU.

That appears a little hard to me, because finally the newspapers not being able, without the greatest dangers, to devote itself to political appreciations, will live hardly than by news. However, when a newspaper publishes a news, it appears quite difficult to to me of him to impose the veracity of it, because, generally, it will not be able about it to answer in an unquestionable way, and when it is morally sure truth, it will miss the material proof.

MACHIAVEL.

One will look there with twice before disturbing the opinion, it is what it is necessary.

MONTESQUIEU.

But I see another thing. If one cannot any more fight you by the newspapers of the inside, one will fight you by the newspapers of the outside. All dissatisfactions, all hatreds will write with the doors of your Kingdom; one will throw over the border of the newspapers and the ignited writings.

MACHIAVEL.

Oh! you touch here at a point which I intend to regulate in the most rigorous way, because the press of the outside is indeed very-dangerous. Initially any introduction or circulation in the Kingdom, of newspapers or writings not - authorized, will be punished of a imprisonment, and it sorrow will be sufficiently severe to remove the desire of it. Then those of my subjects convinced to have written, abroad, counters the government, on their return in the kingdom, sought and will be punished. It is a true unworthiness to write, abroad, counters its government.

MONTESQUIEU.

That depends. But the foreign press of the States borders will speak.

MACHIAVEL.

You believe? We suppose that I reign in a large kingdom. The small States which will border my border will be well trembling, I swear it to you. I will make them return laws which willcontinue their own nationals, in the event of attack against my government, by the way of the press or differently.

MONTESQUIEU.

I see that I was right to say, in the Spirit of the laws, that the borders of a despot were to be devastated. It is necessary that civilization does not penetrate there. Your subjects, I am sure, will not know their history. According to the word of Benjamin Constant, you will make Kingdom an island where one will be unaware of what occurs to Europe, and of the capital another island where one will be unaware of what occurs in the provinces.

MACHIAVEL.

I do not want that my kingdom can be agitated by the noises come from the outside. How the external news arrives they? By a small number of agencies which centralize the information which is transmitted to them of the four parts of the world. Eh well, one must be able to bribe these agencies, and consequently they will give news only under the control of the government.

MONTESQUIEU.

Here are which is well; you can now pass to the police force books.

MACHIAVEL.

This worries me less, because in a time when journalism took a so extraordinary extension, one does not read almost any more books. I by no means intend however to leave them the open door. Initially, I will oblige those which will want to follow the occupation of printer, editor or bookseller to be provided with a patent, i.e. of an authorization which the government will be able to always withdraw to them, either directly, or by decisions of court.

MONTESQUIEU.

But then, these industrialists will be species of public civils servant. The instruments of the thought will become the instruments of the capacity!

MACHIAVEL.

You will not complain any, I imagine, because the things were thus of your time, under the Parliaments; the former practices should be preserved when they are good. I will turn over to tax measurements; I will extend to the books, the stamp which strikes the newspapers, or rather I will impose the weight of the stamp on the books which will not have a certain number of pages. A book, for example, which will not have two hundred pages, three hundred pages, will not be a book, it will be only one booklet. Ibelieve that you seize perfectly the advantage of this combination; on a side I rarefy by the tax this cloud of small writings which are like appendices of journalism; other, I force those which want to escape the stamp to throw myself in compositions long and expensive which will almost not be sold or will be hardly read in this form. There is hardly than poor devils, today, which is the aware to make books; they will give up it. The tax department will discourage literary vanity and the criminal law will disarm printing works itself, because I return the editor and the printer persons in charge, criminally, of what the books contain. It is necessary that, if he is writers dared enough to write works against the government, they cannot find anybody to publish them. The effects of this salutary intimidation will indirectly restore a censure which the government could not exert itself, because of discredit into which this preventive measure fell. Before giving the day to new works, the printers, the editors will consult, they will come to get information, they will produce the books whose one asks them for the impression, and in this manner the government will be always usefully informed publications which prepare against him; it will make some operate the preliminary seizure when it judges it by the way and submits the authors with the courts of them.

MONTESQUIEU.

You had said to me that you would not touch with the civil laws. You do not appear by you to doubt that it is the freedom of the industry which you have just struck by this legislation; the right of ownership is there itself committed, it will pass there in its turn.

MACHIAVEL.

They are words.

MONTESQUIEU.

Then have you, I think, finished with the press.

MACHIAVEL.

Oh! that not.

MONTESQUIEU.

What thus remains?

MACHIAVEL.

Other half of the task.     

TWELFTH DIALOGUES. MACHIAVEL.

I showed you yet only to some extent defensive part of the organic mode which I would impose on the press; I have now to show to you how I could employ this institution with the profit of my capacity. I dare statement that no government did not have, so far, a design bolder than that about which I will speak to you. In the parliamentary countries, it is almost always by the press that the governments perish, eh well, I foresee the possibility of neutralizing the press by the press itself. Since it is a so great force which the journalism, do know you what would make my government? It would be made journalist, it would be incarnated journalism.

MONTESQUIEU.

Really, you make me pass by the strange surprised ones! It is a panorama perpetually varied which you deploy in front of me; I am rather curious, I acknowledge it to you, to see how you will begin there to carry out this new program.

MACHIAVEL.

One will need much less expenses of imagination than you think it. I will count the number of newspapers which will represent what you call the opposition. If there are ten for the opposition of them, I will have twenty for the government of them; if there is twenty of them, I will have forty of them; if there are forty of them, I will have eighty of them. Here with what will be useful to me, you understand it with wonder now, faculty that I reserved myself to authorize the creation of new political sheets.

MONTESQUIEU.

Indeed, that is very-simple.

MACHIAVEL.

Not as much as you believe it however, because it is not necessary that the mass of the public can suspect this tactic; the combination would be missed and the opinion would be detached from itself from the newspapers which would defend my policy openly.

I will divide into three or four categories the sheets devoted to my capacity. In the forefront I will put a certain number of newspapers whose nuance will be frankly official, and who, in all meetings, will defend my acts with excess. They are not these, I begin with you the statement, who will have more the ascending one on the opinion. At the second rank I will place another phalange of newspapers whose character will not be already any more that semi-official and whose mission will be to rejoin with my capacity this mass of men tepid and indifferent who acceptwithout scruple what is made up, but do not go to beyond in their political religion.

It is in the categories of newspapers which will follow that the most powerful levers of my capacity will be. Here, the official or semi-official nuance is degraded compl.tement, seemingly, of course, because the newspapers of which I will speak to you all will consequently be attached chain to my government, chains visible for the ones, invisible with regard to the others. I do not undertake to say to you which of it will be the number, because I will count a body devoted in each opinion, in each party; I will have an aristocratic body in the aristocratic party, a republican body in the republican party, a revolutionary body in the revolutionary party, an anarchistic body, if need be, in the anarchistic party. Like the Wishnou god, my press will have hundred arm, and these arms will give the hand to all the nuances of unspecified opinion on the whole surface of the country. One will be of my party without the knowledge. Those which will believe speech their language will speak mine, those which will believe to agitate their party will agitate mine, those which will believe to go under their flag will go under mine.

MONTESQUIEU.

Are this there realizable designs or phantasmagorias? That gives the giddiness.

MACHIAVEL.

Spare your head, because you are not with the end.

MONTESQUIEU.

I only wonder, how you will be able to direct and rejoin all these militia of publicity clandestinely engaged by your government.

MACHIAVEL.

It is there only one business of organization, you must include/understand it; I will institute, for example, under the title of division of printing works and the press, a common center of action where one will come to seek the instruction and from which the signal will leave. Then, for those which will be only with half in the secrecy of this combination, it will occur an odd spectacle; one will see sheets, devoted with my government, which will attack me, which will shout, which will cause me a crowd of worry.

MONTESQUIEU.

This is above my range, I do not include/understand more.

MACHIAVEL.

It is however not so difficult to conceive; because, notice well that never the bases nor the principles of my government will not be attacked by the newspapers about which I speak to you; they will never make but one polemic of skirmish, that a dynastic opposition within the narrowest limits.

MONTESQUIEU.

And which advantage will you find there?

MACHIAVEL.

Your question is rather ingenuous. The result, really considerable already, will be to make say, by the greatest number: But you see well that one is free, that one can speak under this mode, that it is wrongfully attacked, that instead of compressing, as it could do it, he suffers, he tolerates! Another result, not less important, will be to cause, for example, of the observations like those: See on which point the bases of this government, its principles, are essential on the respect of all; here are newspapers which allow the greatest freedoms of language, eh well, never they do not tackle the established institutions. It is necessary that they are above the injustices of passions, since the same enemies of the government cannot prevent themselves from paying homage to them.

MONTESQUIEU.

Here, I acknowledge it, who am really machiavelic.

MACHIAVEL.

You do much honor to me, but there is better: Using the occult devotion of these public sheets, I then to say that I direct to my liking the opinion in all the questions of domestic policy or external. I excite or I deaden the spirits, I reassure them or I disconcert them, I plead for and it against, truth and the forgery. I make announce a fact and I make it contradict according to the circumstances; I probe the public thought thus, I collect the produced impression, I test combinations, projects, sudden determinations, finally what you call, in France, of the balloons of test. I engagements with my liking my enemies without never compromising my capacity, because, after having made speak these sheets, I then to inflict to them, if need be, the disavowals most energetic; I request the opinion with certain resolutions, I push it or I retain it, I always have the finger on his pulsations, it reflects, without the knowledge, my personal impressions, and sometimes it is filled with wonder to be so constantly at agreement with its sovereign. It is said whereas I have popular fibre, that there is a secret and mysterious sympathy which links me with the movements of my people. MONTESQUIEU.

These various combinations appear to me of an ideal perfection. I however subject still an observation, but very-shy person to you this time: If you leave the silence of China, if you allow the militia your newspapers to make, with the profit your intentions, the false opposition from which you come to speak to me, I do not see too much, in truth, how you will be able to prevent the nonaffiliated newspapers from answering, by true blows, with the provocations of which they will guess the man.ge. Don't you think that they will end up raising some of the veils which cover so many mysterious springs? When they the secrecy of this comedy, will be able you will know to prevent them from laughing at it? The play appears quite embarrassing to me.

MACHIAVEL.

At all; I will say to you that I employed, here, most of my time to examine the fort and the weak one of these combinations, I got information much about what touches in the conditions of existence of the press in the parliamentary countries. You must know that journalism is a kind of freemasonry: those which live about it all are more or less attached the ones to the others by the bonds of professional discretion; similar with the old omens, they easily do not reveal the secrecy of their oracles. They would not gain anything to be betrayed, because they have for the majority of the more or less ashamed wounds. It is rather probable, I am appropriate of it, that in the center of the capital, in a certain ray of people, these things will not be a mystery; but, everywhere else, one will not suspect it, and the large majority of the nation will walk with the most whole confidence on the trace of the guides that I will have given him.

What me matters that, in the capital, a certain world can know about the artifices of my journalism? It is with the province that most of its influence is reserved. There I will always have the temperature of opinion which will be necessary for me, and each one of my attacks will surely carry there. The press of province will belong to me in entirety, the bus there, not of possible contradiction nor of discussion; center of administration where I will sit, one will regularly transmit to the governor of each province the order to make speak the newspapers in such or such direction, so that per same hour, on all the surface of the country, such influence will be produced, such impulse will be given, very often even before the capital suspects it. You see by there that the opinion of the capital is not made to worry me. It will be late, when it is needed, on the movement external which would wrap it, if need be, without its knowledge.

MONTESQUIEU.

The sequence of your ideas involves all with as well force, as make you lose me the feeling of a last objection which I wantedto subject to you. It remains constant, in spite of what you have just said, that it still remains, in the capital, a certain number of independent newspapers. It will be about impossible for them to speak political, that is certain, but they will be able to make you a war of details. Your administration will not be perfect; the development of the absolute capacity comprises a quantity of abuse whose sovereign even is not causes; on all the acts of your agents which will touch with the private interest, one will find you vulnerable; one will complain, one will attack your agents, you of it will be necessarily responsible, and your consideration will succumb in detail.

MACHIAVEL.

I do not fear that.

MONTESQUIEU.

It is true that you multiplied the means of repression so much, that you have only the choice of the blows.

MACHIAVEL.

It is not what I thought of saying; I do not want to be even obliged to have to unceasingly make repression, I want, on a simple injunction, to have the possibility of stopping any discussion on a subject which touches with the administration.

MONTESQUIEU.

And how will you take to you there?

MACHIAVEL.

I will oblige the newspapers to accomodate their columns at the head corrections which the government will communicate to them; the agents of the administration will make them pass from the notes in which one will say to them categorically: You have advanced such fact, it is not exact; you allowed yourselves such criticism, you were unjust, you were improper, you had wrong, hold-you it for known as. It will be, as you see it, a honest censure and with open sky.

MONTESQUIEU.

In which, of course, one will not have the counterpart.

MACHIAVEL.

Obviously not; the discussion will be closed.

MONTESQUIEU.

In this manner you will always have the last word, you will haveit without using of violence, they are very-clever. As you said it a few moments ago to me tr.s-bien, your government is incarnated journalism.

MACHIAVEL.

Just as I do not want as the country can be agitated by the noises of the outside, in the same way I do not want as it can be it by the noises come from the inside, even by the simple private news. When there is some extraordinary suicide, some large too v.reuse money business, some misdeed of public servant, I will send to defend with the newspapers to speak about it. Silence on these things respects public honesty better that the noise.

MONTESQUIEU.

And during this time, you, you will make journalism with excess?

MACHIAVEL.

It is needed well. To use of the press, to use about it in all the forms, such is, today, the law of the capacities which want to live. It is extremely singular, but that is. Also I in this way beyond would engage me well what you can imagine.

To include/understand the extent of my system, it should be seen how the language of my press has to contribute with the instruments of my policy: I want, I suppose, to make leave a solution such external or interior complication; this solution, indicated by my newspapers, which, for several months, have practised each one in their direction the public spirit, occurs a beautiful morning, like an official event: You know with which clever discretion and which cares the documents of the authority must be compiled, in the important economic situations: the problem to be solved in such a case is to give a kind of satisfaction to all the parties. Eh well, each one of my newspapers, according to its nuance, will endeavour to persuade with each party that the resolution which one took is that which supports it more. What will not be written in an official document, one will make it leave by way interpretation; what will only be indicated, the semi-official newspapers will translate it more openly, the democratic newspapers and revolutionists will shout it over the roofs; and while one will dispute, that one will give the most various interpretations to my acts, my government will be able to always answer all and each one: You are mistaken on my intentions, you badly read my declarations; I never wanted to say but this or that that. Essence is never to put itself in contradiction with oneself.

MONTESQUIEU.

How! After what you have just said to me, you have a similar claim?

MACHIAVEL.

Undoubtedly, and your astonishment proves to me that you did not include/understand me. They are the words much more than the acts which it is a question of making grant. How do you want that the great mass of a nation can judge if it is the logic which carries out its government? It is enough to say it to him. I thus want that the various phases of my policy are presented like the development of a single thought being attached to an immutable goal. Each event envisaged or unforeseen will be a wisely brought result, the variations of direction will be only the various faces of the same question, the various ways which lead to the same goal, the varied means of an identical solution continued without slackening through the obstacles. The last event will be given like the logical conclusion of all the others.

MONTESQUIEU.

In truth, it is necessary that you are admired! What a force of head and what a activity!

MACHIAVEL.

Each day, my newspapers would be filled of official speeches, reports, reports/ratios to the ministers, reports/ratios to the sovereign. I would not forget only I live in one time when one believes capacity to solve, by industry, all the problems of the company, where one deals unceasingly with the improvement of the fate of the working classes. I would all the more stick to these questions, which they are a very-happy derivative for the concerns of the domestic policy. Among southernmost people, it is necessary that the governments appear unceasingly occupied; the masses agree to be inactive, but in a condition, it is that those which control them give them the spectacle of a ceaseless activity, of a kind of fever; that they constantly attract their eyes by innovations, surprises, blows of theatre; that is odd perhaps, but, once again, that is.

I would comply point in point with these indications; consequently, I would make, as regards trade, of industry, arts and even of administration, to study all kinds of projects, plans, combinations, changes, the rehandlings, improvements whose repercussion in the press would cover the voice of the most publicity agents and most fertile. The political economy has, says one, made fortune on your premise, eh well, I would not leave anything to invent, anything to publish, anything to saying even to your theorists, your utopians, to the most impassioned d.clamateurs your schools. The wellbeing of the people would be the object single, invariable, of my public confidences. Either that I speak myself, or which I make speak by my ministers or my writers, one would never dry up on the size of the country, prosperity, the majesty of his mission and his destinies; one would not cease maintaining it the great principles of the modern right, of the major problems which agitate humanity. The mostenthusiastic liberalism, most universal, would breathe in my writings. The people of the Occident like the Eastern style, also the style of all the official speeches, of all official proclamations should it be always picturesque, constantly pompeux, full with rise and reflections. The people do not like the atheistic governments, in my communications with the public, I would never fail to put my acts under the invocation of the Divinity, by associating, with address, my own star with that of the country.

I would like that one at every moment compared the acts of my reign with those of the last governments. It would be the best manner of emphasizing my benefits and of exciting the recognition which they deserve.

It would be very-important to highlight the faults of those which preceded me, of showing that I knew to always avoid them. One would maintain thus, counters the modes which my capacity succeeded, a kind of antipathy, of aversion even, which would end up becoming irrevocable like an atonement.

Non-seulement I would unceasingly give to a certain number of newspapers the mission of exalter the glory of my reign, to reject on other governments that mine the responsibility for the faults of the European policy, but I would like that most of these praises appeared to be only one echo of the foreign sheets, which one would reproduce articles, truths or forgery, whom would pay a homage bursting to my own policy. With the surplus I would have, abroad, of the balanced newspapers, whose support would be all the more effective as I would make them give a color of opposition on some points of detail.

My principles, my ideas, my acts would be represented with the aureole of youth, the prestige of the new right in opposition with decrepitude and the nullity of the old institutions.

I am not unaware of that one needs valves for the public spirit, that the mental activity, driven back on a point, necessarily refers on another. Therefore I would not fear to throw the nation in all the theoretical and practical speculations of the industrial mode.

Apart from the policy, moreover, I will say to you that I would be a very-good prince, that I would let be agitated in full peace the philosophical or religious questions. As regards religion, the doctrines of the free examination became a kind of monomanie. One should not oppose this tendency, one could not it without danger. In the most advanced countries of Europe in civilization, the invention of printing works ended up giving rise to a literature insane, furious, unrestrained, almost immonde, it is a great evil. Eh well, that is sad with saying, but it will almost be enough not to obstruct it, so that this rage to write, which has your parliamentary countries, that is to say about satisfied.

This literature pestif.r.e which one cannot prevent the course, the flatness of the writers and of the politicians who would be in possession of journalism, would not fail to form a contrast pushing back with the dignity of the language which would fall from the steps of the throne, with the dialectical long-lived one and coloured which one would have care to support all the manifestations of the capacity. You include/understand, now, why I wanted to surround the prince of this swarm of publicity agents, men of administration, lawyers, businessmen and jurisconsults who are essential with the drafting of this quantity of official communications about which I spoke to you, and whose impression would be always very-strong on the spirits.

Such is, in short, the general saving in my mode on the press.

MONTESQUIEU.

Then finished you with it?

MACHIAVEL.

Yes, and with regret, because I was much shorter than it would have been needed. But our moments are counted, it is necessary to go quickly.

THIRTEENTH DIALOGUE.

MONTESQUIEU.

I need to give me a little from the emotions which you have just made me cross. What a fruitfulness of resources, what a designs strange! There is poetry in all that and I do not know which fatal beauty only modern Byrons would not repudiate; there one finds the scenic talent of the author of the Mandrake.

MACHIAVEL.

You believe, Mister de Secondat? Something however says to me that you are not reassured in your irony; you are not sure that these things are not possible.

MONTESQUIEU.

If it is my opinion which worries you, you will have it; I await the end.

MACHIAVEL.

I am not there yet.

MONTESQUIEU.

Eh well, continue.

MACHIAVEL.

I am with your orders.

MONTESQUIEU.

You, at your beginnings, have just enacted on the press a formidable legislation. You extinguished all the voices, except for yours. Here are dumb parties in front of you, don't you fear anything the plots?

MACHIAVEL.

Not, because I would be well not very far-sighted if, of a reverse of the hand, I did not disarm them at the same time all.

MONTESQUIEU.

Which are thus your means?

MACHIAVEL.

I would start by making off-set per hundreds those which accomodated, the weapons with the hand, av.nement of my capacity. It was said to me that in Italy, in Germany and France, it was by the secret societies that the men of disorder recruited themselves who conspire against the governments; I would break at home these dark wire which are woven in the dens like the cobwebs.

MONTESQUIEU.

Afterwards?

MACHIAVEL.

The fact of organizing a secret society, or of affiliating themselves there, will be punished rigorously.

MONTESQUIEU.

Well, for the future; but existing companies?

MACHIAVEL.

I will expel, by way of general safety, all those which will be manifestly known to have formed part of it. Those which I will not reach will remain under the blow of a perpetual threat, because I will return a law who will allow the government to off-set, by administrative way, whoever will have been affiliated.

MONTESQUIEU.

I.e. without judgement.

MACHIAVEL.

Why you say: without judgement? Isn't the decision of a government a judgement? Be sure that one will have little pity for the factious ones. In the countries disturbed without delay by the civil discords, it is necessary to bring back peace by acts of strength relentless; there is an account of victims to make to ensure peace, one does it. Then, the aspect of that which order becomes so imposing, that no one does not dare to make an attempt on its life. After having covered with blood Italy, Sylla could reappear in Rome as a ordinary person; nobody touched a hair of his head.

MONTESQUIEU.

I see that you are during one time of terrible execution; I do not dare to make you observation. It seems to to me however that, even while following your intentions, you could be less rigorous.

MACHIAVEL.

If one addressed oneself to my leniency, I would see. I then to even to entrust you that part of the severe provisions that I will write in the law will become purely comminatory, in the condition however that one me not force to be used about it differently.

MONTESQUIEU.

It is there what you call comminatory! However your leniency reassures me a little; moments ago when, if some mortal heard you, you would freeze blood to him.

MACHIAVEL.

Why? I lived of very near with the duke of Valentinois which left a terrible fame and which deserved it well, because it had pitiless moments; however I ensure you that the needs for execution once passed, it was a man enough d.bonnaire. One could about it say as many almost all the absolute monarchs; at the bottom they are good: they are it especially for the small ones.

MONTESQUIEU.

I do not know if I do not love you better in the glare of your anger: your softness frightens me more still. But let us return. You destroyed the secret societies.

MACHIAVEL.

Do not go so quickly; I did not do that, you will bring some confusion.

MONTESQUIEU.

What and how?

MACHIAVEL.

I prohibited the secret societies, of which character and the intrigues would escape the monitoring from my government, but I did not intend to deprive to me of a means of information, of an occult influence which can be considerable if one can make use of it.

MONTESQUIEU.

What can you meditate on top?

MACHIAVEL.

I foresee the possibility of giving, with a certain number of these companies, a kind of legal existence or rather of centralizing them all in only one whose I will name the supreme chief. By there I will hold in my hand the various revolutionary elements that the country contains. People who compose these companies belong to all the nations, with all the classes, all the rows; I will be informed of the most obscure intrigues of the policy. It will be there as an appendix of my police force about which I will have to speak to you soon.

This underground world of the secret societies is filled with empty brains, whose I do not make the least case, but there are directions to give, forces to be driven. If it is agitated something there, it is my hand which stirs up; if it prepares a plot there, the chief it is me: I am the chief of the league.

MONTESQUIEU.

And you believe that these troops of democrats, these republicans, these anarchists, these terrorists will let to you approach and break the bread with them; you can believe that those which do not want domination human will accept a guide which will be as much to say a Master!

MACHIAVEL.

It is that you do not know, . Montesquieu, which there is impotence and even of silliness at the majority of the men of the European demagogy. These tigers have hearts of sheep, heads full with wind; it is enough to speak their language to penetrate in their row. Their ideas have almost all, moreover, of incredible affinities with the doctrines of the absolute capacity. Their dream is the absorption of the individuals, in a unit symbolicsystem. They ask the complete realization of the equality, by the virtue of a capacity which can be ultimately only in the hand of one man. You see that I am still here the chief of their school! And then it should be said that they do not have the choice. The secret societies will exist under the conditions which I have just said or they will not exist.

MONTESQUIEU.

The finale of sic the volo sic jubeo is never made wait a long time with you. I believe that, definitely, kept here you are against the conspiracies well.

MACHIAVEL.

Yes, because it is wise to still say to you that the legislation will not allow the meetings, the secret meetings which will exceed a certain number of people.

MONTESQUIEU.

How much?

MACHIAVEL.

Do you hold with these details? One will not allow a meeting of more than fifteen or twenty people, if you want.

MONTESQUIEU.

Eh what! won't friends be able to dine together beyond this number?

MACHIAVEL.

You are alarmed already, I see it well, in the name of the Gallic gaiety. Eh well, yes, one will be able it, because my reign will not be as savage as you it think, but in a condition, it is that one will not speak political.

MONTESQUIEU.

One will be able to speak literature?

MACHIAVEL.

Yes, but in the condition that under pretext of literature one will not meet with a political aim, because one can still not speak political about the whole and give nevertheless to a feast a character of demonstration which would be understood by the public. That is not needed.

MONTESQUIEU.

Alas! how, in a similar system, it is difficult to the citizens to live without carrying shade to the government!

MACHIAVEL.

It is an error, it will have only the factious ones there which will suffer from these restrictions; nobody other will feel them.

It goes without saying I deal here acts with rebellion against my capacity, neither of the attacks which would have as an aim to reverse it, nor of the attacks either against the person of the prince, or against his authority or its institutions. It is there of true crimes, which are repressed by the common right of all the legislations. They would be envisaged and punished in my kingdom according to a classification and following definitions which would not leave taken with least not reached direct or indirect against the order of things established.

MONTESQUIEU.

Allow me of me into proud with you, in this respect, and not to enqu.rir me of your means. It is not enough, not however to establish a Draconian legislation; it is still necessary to find a magistrature which wants to apply it; this point is not without difficulty.

MACHIAVEL.

There is none of it.

MONTESQUIEU.

You thus will destroy the legal organization?

MACHIAVEL.

I do not destroy anything: I modify and I innovate.

MONTESQUIEU.

Then you will establish courses martial, provostal, emergency courts finally?

MACHIAVEL.

Not.

MONTESQUIEU.

What will you thus make?

MACHIAVEL.

It is good that you know initially that I will not need to issuea great number of the severe laws, whose I will continue the application. Much of them will exist already and be still in force; because all the governments free or absolute, republican or monarchical, are with the catches with the same difficulties; they are obliged, in the moments of crisis, to resort to laws of rigour of which the ones remain, of which the others weaken after the needs which saw them being born. One must make use of the ones and others; with regard to the last, one recalls that they were not explicitly repealed, that they was perfectly wise laws, that the return of the abuses which they prevented makes their application necessary. In this manner the government does not appear to make, which will be often true, that an act of good administration.

You see that they are not to give a little spring to the action the courts, which is always easy in the countries of centralization where the magistrature is in direct contact with the administration, by the way the ministry which it concerns.

As for the new laws which will be made under my reign and which, for the majority, will have been made in the form of simple decrees, the application will perhaps not be also easy, because in the countries where the magistrate is irremovable it resists of itself, in the interpretation of the law, with the too direct action of the capacity.

But I believe to have found a combination very-clever, very-simple, seemingly purely lawful, which, without attacking the irremovability of the magistrature, will modify what there is of too absolute in the consequences of the principle. I will return a decree which will put the magistrates at the retirement, when they arrive at a certain age. I do not doubt that here still I do not have the opinion with me, because it is a painful spectacle to see, as that is so frequent, the judge who has to rule at every moment on the highest questions and most difficult, to fall into a nullity from spirit which makes from there it unable.

MONTESQUIEU.

But allow, I have some concepts on the things about which you speak. The fact that you advance is not whole in conformity with the experiment. At the men who live by the continual exercise of work of the spirit, the intelligence does not weaken thus; it is there, if I then the statement, the privil.ge of the thought at those of which it becomes the principal element. If, in some magistrates, faculties stagger with the age, at the greatest number they preserve, and their lights are always increasing; it is not necessary to replace them, because death makes in their rows the natural vacuums which it must make; but had there it indeed among them as many examples of decline, than you it claim, than it would be better thousand times, in the interest of a good justice, to suffer this evil to accept your remedy.

MACHIAVEL.

I have reasons higher than yours.

MONTESQUIEU.

Reason of State?

MACHIAVEL.

Perhaps. Is sure of a thing, it is that, in this new organization, the magistrates will not deviate more than before, when it will act of purely civil interests?

MONTESQUIEU.

What do I know some? because, according to your words, I see already that they will deviate when they are political interests.

MACHIAVEL.

They will not deviate; they will make owe them as they must do it, because, in political matters, it is necessary, in the interest of the order, than the judges are always side of the capacity. They would be worst things, than a sovereign could be even reached by factious stops which the whole country would seize, at the moment, against the government. What would be used for to have imposed silence on the press, if it were found in the judgements of the courts?

MONTESQUIEU.

Under is modest appearances, your means thus quite powerful, that you allot such a range to him?

MACHIAVEL.

Yes, because it makes disappear this spirit from resistance, this spirit of body always so dangerous in legal companies which preserved the memory, perhaps the worship, of the last governments. It introduces into their centre a mass of new elements, whose influences all are favorable to the spirit which animates my reign. Each Twenty, thirty, forty places of magistrates who become vacant by retirement, involve a displacement in all the personnel of the justice which can be renewed thus almost basic in roof every six months. Only one vacancy, you know it, can involve fifty nominations by the successive effect of the holders of various ranks, which move. You judge what it can about it be when they are thirty or forty holidays which occur at the same time. Non-seulement the collective spirit disappears in what it can have of policy, but one approaches more narrowly the government, which has a greater number of si.ges. There are young men who have the desire to make their way, which is not stopped any more in their career by theperpetuity of those which precede them. They know that the government likes the order, that the country also likes it, and it only acts to serve them both, by making good justice, when the order is interested there.

MONTESQUIEU.

But with less than one blindness without name, one will reproach you for exciting, in the magistrature, a fatal competitive spirit in the legal bodies; I will not show you which are the continuations, because I believe that that would not stop you.

MACHIAVEL.

I do not claim to escape criticism; it imports me little, provided that I do not hear it. I would have as a principle, in all things, the irrevocability of my decisions, in spite of the murmurs. A prince who acts thus is always sure to impose the respect of his will.

FOURTEENTH DIALOGUES.

MACHIAVEL.

I already said you many time, and I still repeat it to you, that I do not need all to create, all to organize; that I find in the already existing institutions most of the instruments of my capacity. Do you know what it is that the constitutional guarantee?

MONTESQUIEU.

Yes, and I regret it for you, because I remove you, without wanting it, a surprise which you would perhaps not have been annoyed to spare me, with the skill of setting in scene which is clean for you.

MACHIAVEL.

What do you think about it?

MONTESQUIEU.

I think what is true, at least for France from which you seem to want to speak, it is that it is a law of circumstance who must be modified, if not compl.tement to disappear, under a mode of constitutional freedom.

MACHIAVEL.

I find you quite moderate on this point. It is simply, according to your ideas, one of the most tyrannical restrictions of theworld. What! when private individuals are injured by government officials in the performance of their duties, and that they will translate them in front of the courts, the judges will have to answer them: We cannot make you right, the door of the court is closed: ask for the administration the authorization of continue its civils servant. But it is a true denial of justice. How much time will it sometimes happen at the government to authorize similar continuations?

MONTESQUIEU.

About what do complain you? It seems to to me that this made tr.s-bien your business.

MACHIAVEL.

I said that to you only to show yourselves that, in States where the action of justice meets such obstacles, a government does not have large - thing to fear courts. It is always as transitional provisions which one inserts in the laws of such exceptions, but the times of transition once spent, the exceptions remain, and it is with reason, because when the order reigns, they do not obstruct, and when it is disturbed, they are necessary.

It is another modern institution which does not serve with less effectiveness the action of the central capacity: it is creation, near the courts, of a great magistrature which you call the public ministry and which was formerly called, with much more reason, the ministry for the King, because this function is primarily removable and revocable with the liking of the prince. I do not need to say to you which is the influence of this magistrate on the courts close which it si.ge; it is considerable. Retain all this well. Now I will speak to you about the supreme court of appeal, of which I reserved myself to say something to you and who plays a so considerable part in the administration of justice.

The supreme court of appeal is more than one body legal: it is, to some extent, a fourth capacity in the State, because it rests with to him to fix in last spring the direction of the law. Also I will repeat you here what I believe to have said to you concerning the Senate and of the legislative Parliament: the similar Court of Justice which would be compl.tement independent of the government could, under the terms of its capacity of interpretation sovereign and almost discr.tionnaire, to reverse it when she would like. It would be enough for him for that systematically to restrict or extend, in the direction of freedom, the provisions of laws which regulate the exercise of the political rights.

MONTESQUIEU.

And it is apparently the opposite which you will ask him?

MACHIAVEL.

I will not ask him anything, it will do itself what it will be advisable to do. Because it is here that will contribute most strongly the various causes of influence about which I spoke to you higher. The more the judge is close being able it, the more it belongs to him. The preserving spirit of the reign will develop there with a higher degree than everywhere else, and the laws of high political police force will receive, in the centre of this large assembly, an interpretation so favorable to my capacity, than I will be exempted of a crowd of restrictive measurements which, without that, would become necessary.

MONTESQUIEU.

One would really say, to hear you, that the laws are likely the oddest interpretations. Aren't the legislative texts clear and precise, they can lend themselves to extensions or restrictions as those which you indicate?

MACHIAVEL.

It is not with the author of the Spirit of the laws, with the magistrate experienced who had to hand down excellent judgments so much, that I then to claim to learn what it is that jurisprudence. It there has not text, so clearly that it is, which cannot receive the most contrary solutions, even in pure civil law; but I ask you to notice that we are here in political matters. However, it is a practice common to the legislators of all times, to adopt, in some their provisions, a rather elastic drafting so that it can, according to circumstances', to be used to govern cases or to introduce exceptions on which it had not been advisable to be explained in a more precise way.

I know perfectly that I must give you examples, because without that my proposal appears too vague to you. The embarrassment for me is to present some to you which is enough large of general information to exempt to me to go into long details. Here is one that I take preferably, because a few moments ago we touched with this matter.

While speaking about the constitutional guarantee, you said that this law of exception should be amended in a free country.

Eh well, I suppose that this law exists in the State which I control, I suppose that it was modified; thus I imagine that before me it was promulgated a law, which, out of electoral matter, allowed to continue the government officials without the authorization of the Council of State.

The question arises under my reign which, as you know it, introduced great changes into the public law. One wants to continue a civil servant in front of the courts at the time of an electoral fact; the magistrate of the public ministry rises andsays: The favour which one wants to prevail oneself does not exist today any more; it is not compatible any more with the current institutions. The old law which exempted authorization of the Council of State, in such a case, was implicitly repealed. The courts answer yes or not, in the final analysis the debate is carried before the supreme court of appeal and this high jurisdiction thus fixes the public law on this point: the old law is repealed implicitly; the authorization of the Council of State is necessary to continue the public civils servant, even out of electoral matter.

Here another example, it has something of special, it is borrowed from the police force of the press: It was said to me that there was in France a law which obliged, under a penal sanction, all people making trade distribute and hawk writings to be provided with an authorization delivered by the public servant who is appointed, in each province, with the general administration. The law wanted to regulate hawking and to compel it with a narrow monitoring; such is the essential goal of this law; but the text of the provision carries, I suppose: "All distributors or hawkers will have to be provided with an authorization, etc"

Eh well, the supreme court of appeal, if the question is proposed to him, will be able to say: It is not only the professional fact which the law in question kept in mind. It is done everything unspecified of distribution or hawking. Consequently, the author even of a writing or a work which gives one or more specimens from there, was this as homage, without preliminary authorization, made act of distribution and hawking; consequently it falls under the blow from the penal provision.

You see continuation what results from a similar interpretation; instead of a simple law of police force, you have a restrictive law of the right to publish its thought by the way of the press.

MONTESQUIEU.

It any more but did not fail to you to be a lawyer.

MACHIAVEL.

That is absolutely necessary. How today the governments are reversed? By legal distinctions, by subtleties of constitutional law, while using against the capacity of all the means, of all the weapons, all the combinations which are not directly prohibited by the law. And these artifices of right, that the parties do employ with such an amount of eagerness against the capacity, you would not like that the capacity employed them against the parties? But the fight would not be equal, resistance would not even be possible; it would be necessary to abdicate.

MONTESQUIEU.

You have as well shelves to prevent, as it is a miracle if youall envisage them. The courts are not bound by their judgements. With a jurisprudence as that which will be applied under your reign, I see you many lawsuit on the arms. The justiciable ones will not be wearied to knock on the door of the courts to require other interpretations of them.

MACHIAVEL.

In the first times, it is possible; but when a certain number of stops definitively sit jurisprudence, nobody will allow any more what it defends, and the source of the lawsuits will be dried up. The public opinion will be alleviated even so much, that one will refer oneself some, on the direction of the laws, in the semi-official opinions of the administration.

MONTESQUIEU.

And how, I request from you?

MACHIAVEL.

In such or such economic situations given, when one takes place to fear that some difficulty does not rise on such or such point of legislation, the administration, in the form of opinion, will declare that such or such fact falls under the application from the law, that the law extends to such or such case.

MONTESQUIEU.

But in fact there only declarations do not bind in any manner the courts.

MACHIAVEL.

Without any doubt, but these declarations will not have of it less one very-large authority, a very-large influence on the decisions of the court, on the basis of an administration as powerful as that which I organized. They will have especially a very-large empire on the individual resolutions, and, in a crowd of case, not to always say, they will prevent annoying lawsuits; one will abstain from.

MONTESQUIEU.

As we advance, I see that your government becomes increasingly paternal. They are almost patriarchal legal manners there. It appears impossible to to me, indeed, that one does not take account of a solicitude to you which is exerted under so many clever forms.

MACHIAVEL.

You however obliged here to recognize that I am well far from the cruel processes of government which you seem to me to lend at thebeginning of this maintenance. You see that in all this violence does not play any part; I take my point of support where each one takes it today, in the right.

MONTESQUIEU.

In the right of most extremely.

MACHIAVEL.

The right which is made obey is always the right of most extremely; I do not know exception to this rule.

FIFTEENTH DIALOGUE.

MONTESQUIEU.

Though we traversed a very-vast circle, and that you already almost very organized, I should not hide you that it remains you still much to make compl.tement to reassure me over the duration of your capacity. The thing of the world which astonishes me more, it is that you gave him for base the popular vote, i.e., the element of its nature softest which I know. We hear well, I request from you; you said to me that you were a king?

MACHIAVEL.

Yes, king.

MONTESQUIEU.

With life or hereditary?

MACHIAVEL.

I am a king, as one is a king in all the kingdoms of the world, hereditary king with a descent called to succeed me of male in male, by order of offspring, with the perpetual exclusion of the women.

MONTESQUIEU.

You are not gallant.

MACHIAVEL.

Allow, I take as a starting point the the traditions by franque monarchy and salienne.

MONTESQUIEU.

You will undoubtedly explain me how you believe capacity to makeheredity, with the democratic vote of the United States?

MACHIAVEL.

Yes.

MONTESQUIEU.

How! you hope, with this principle, to bind the will of the future generations?

MACHIAVEL.

Yes.

MONTESQUIEU.

What would I like to see, as for present, it is the way in which you will draw some with this vote, when it will act to apply it to the appointment of the public officers?

MACHIAVEL.

Which public officers? You know well that, in the monarchical States, it is the government which appoints the officials of all the rows.

MONTESQUIEU.

That depends on which civils servant. Those which are appointed with the administration of the communes, in general, are named by the inhabitants, even under the monarchical governments.

MACHIAVEL.

One will change that by a law; they will be named in the future by the government.

MONTESQUIEU.

And is the representatives of the nation, also you who name them?

MACHIAVEL.

You know well that that is not possible.

MONTESQUIEU.

Then I you lime pits, bus if you give up the vote with itself, if you do not find here whatever new combination, the assembly of the representatives of the people will not delay, under the influence of the parties, to fill of hostile deputies to your capacity.

MACHIAVEL.

Also hoped I not less of the world to give up the vote with itself.

MONTESQUIEU.

I expected it. But which combination will you adopt?

MACHIAVEL.

The first point is to bind towards the government those which want to represent the country. I will impose to the candidates the solemnity of the oath. It is not here question of an oath lent to the nation, as your revolutionists of 89 heard it; I want an oath of fidelity lent to the prince himself and to his constitution.

MONTESQUIEU.

But since in policy you do not fear to violate yours, how can you hope that one will show oneself, on this point, more scrupulous than yourself?

MACHIAVEL.

I count little on the political conscience of the men; I count on the power of the opinion: nobody will dare to degrade himself in front of it missing some openly with the sworn faith. One will dare it of as much less, that the oath that I will impose will precede the election instead of following it, and which one will be without excuse to come to seek the vote, under these conditions, when one in advance is not decided to be useful to me. It is now necessary to give to the government the means of resisting the influence of the opposition, to prevent which it does not make desert the rows from those which want to defend it. At the time of the elections, the parties have as a practice to proclaim their candidates and to pose them opposite the government; I will make like them, I will have declared candidates and I will pose them opposite the parties.

MONTESQUIEU.

If you were not the Almighty, the means would be hateful, because, by offering the combat openly, you cause the blows.

MACHIAVEL.

I hear that the agents of my government, from the first to the last, get busy to make triumph my candidates.

MONTESQUIEU.

That goes from oneself, it is the consequence. MACHIAVEL.

All is of the greattest importance in this matter. "The laws which establish the vote are fundamental; the way in which the vote is given is fundamental; the law which fixes the manner of giving the tickets of vote is fundamental [9]." Isn't this you who said that?

MONTESQUIEU.

I always do not recognize my language when it passes by your mouth; it seems to to me that the words that you quote applied to the democratic government.

MACHIAVEL.

Undoubtedly, and you already could see that my essential policy was to press me on the people; that, though I carry a crown, my real and declared goal is to represent it. Agent of all the capacities that it delegated to me, it is me only, ultimately, which am its true agent. What I want it wants it, which I do it does it. Consequently, it is essential that at the time of the elections the factions cannot substitute their influence for that of which I am armed personification. Also, I found other means still of paralysing their efforts. It is necessary that you know, for example, that the law who prohibits the meetings will apply naturally to those which could be formed for the elections. In this manner, the parties will be able neither to act in concert, nor to get along.

MONTESQUIEU.

Why do you always put the parties ahead? Under isn't pretext of impose obstacles to them, with the voters themselves that you impose them? The parties, ultimately, are only collections of voters; if the voters cannot light by meetings, by talks, how will they be able to vote with full knowledge of the facts?

MACHIAVEL.

I see that you are unaware of with which infinite art, with which easy way political passions thwart prohibitory measurements. You do not embarrass voters, those which will be animated good intentions will always know for which to vote. Moreover, I will use of tolerance; non-seulement I will not prohibit the meetings which will be formed in the interest of my candidates, but I will go until closing the eyes on the intrigues of some popular candidatures which will be agitated bruyamment in the name of freedom; only, it is wise to say to you that those which will shout most extremely will be men with me.

MONTESQUIEU.

And how do you regulate the vote? MACHIAVEL.

Initially, in what touches the campaigns, I do not want that the voters will vote in the centers of agglomeration, where they could be in contact with the spirit of opposition of the boroughs or the cities, and, from there, to receive the instruction which would come from the capital; I want that one votes by commune. The result of this combination, seemingly so simple, will be nevertheless considerable.

MONTESQUIEU.

It is easy to include/understand it, you oblige the vote of the campaigns to divide between unimportant notorieties, or to refer, in the absence of names known, on the candidates designated by your government. I would be quite surprised if, in this system, it hatches much of capacities or talents.

MACHIAVEL.

The law and order needs less men of talent than men devoted to the government. The great capacity si.ge on the throne and among those which surround it, elsewhere it is useless; it is almost harmful even, because it can be exerted only against the capacity.

MONTESQUIEU.

Your aphorisms slice like the sword; I do not have arguments to oppose to you. Thus begin again, I request from you, the continuation of your electoral payment.

MACHIAVEL.

By the reasons which I have just deduced you, I do not want either a list system which distorts the election, which allows the coalition of men and principles. Besides I will divide the electoral coll.ges into a certain number of administrative units, in which there will be place only for the election of one deputy, and where, consequently, each voter will be able to bear only one name on his ballot paper.

It is necessary, moreover, to have the possibility of neutralizing the opposition in the districts where it would too highly be felt. Thus, I suppose that, in elections former, district is made to notice by majority of its votes hostile, or that one takes place to expect that it will decide against the candidates of the government, anything is not easier than to cure it: if this district has only one small digit of population, one attaches it to a district close or moved away, but much more extended, in which its voices are drowned and where its political spirit is lost. If the hostile district, on the contrary, has an important figure of population, one splits it in several parts which one annexes to the close districts, in which it isdestroyed compl.tement.

I pass, you include/understand it well, on a crowd of points of detail which are only the accessories of the unit. Thus, I divide with the need the coll.ges into sections for coll.ges, to give, when it is needed, more catch to the action of the administration and I make chair the coll.ges and the sections of coll.ges by the municipal officers whose nomination depends on the government.

MONTESQUIEU.

I notice, with a certain surprise, which you do not use here of a measurement that you indicate in time to Leon X, and who consists in the substitution of the tickets of vote by the tellers after the vote.

MACHIAVEL.

It would be perhaps difficult today, and I believe that one should use of this means only with the greatest prudence. A skilful government has, moreover so much other resources! Without buying the vote directly, i.e. with discovered sums of money, nothing will not be easier for him than to make vote the populations with its liking by means of administrative concessions, by promising here a port, there a market, further one road, a channel; and contrary, by not doing anything for the cities and the boroughs where the vote will be hostile.

MONTESQUIEU.

I do not have anything to reproach the depth these combinations; but don't you fear that it is not said that sometimes you corrupt and sometimes you oppress the popular vote? Don't you fear to compromise your capacity in fights where it will be always so directly committed? Least success than one will gain over your candidates will be a bright victory which will put your government in failure. What does not cease worrying me for you, it is that I always see you obliged to succeed in all things, under penalty of a disaster.

MACHIAVEL.

You speak the language of the fear; you reassure. At the point where I arrived from there, I succeeded in so many things, which I then not to perish by the infinitely small ones. The sand grain of Bossuet is not made for the true politicians. I am so advanced in my career which I could, without danger, to face even of the storms; what thus means the negligible embarrassments of administration about which you speak? Do you believe that I have the claim to be perfect? I do not know not although it will be made more than one fault around me? Not, undoubtedly, I will not be able to make that there are not some plunderings, some scandals. Will that prevent that the whole of the businesses does not go and does not go well? Essence is much less not to make anyfault, to support for it the responsibility with an attitude for energy which imposes to the detractors. Nevertheless would the opposition manage to introduce into my room some d.clamateurs, whom would be essential me? I am not those which want to count without the needs for their time.

One of my great principles is to oppose the similar ones. Just as I use the press by the press, I would use the platform by the platform; I would have as much as one would need of them men drawn up for the word and able to speak several hours without stopping. Essence is to have a solid majority and a president which one is sure. There is a particular art to lead the debates and to remove the vote. I besides would have need for the artifices of the parliamentary strategy? The nineteen twentieth of the Room would be men with me who would vote on an instruction, while I would make drive wire of a factitious opposition and clandestinely engaged; after that, which one comes to do of beautiful speeches: they will enter the ears of my deputies like the wind enters the hole of a lock. Do you want now that I speak to you about my Senate?

MONTESQUIEU.

Not, I know by Caligula what it can be.

SIXTEENTH DIALOGUE.

MONTESQUIEU.

One of the projecting points of your policy, it is the destruction of the parties and the destruction of the collective forces. You did not fail in this program; however, I still see around you things to which you did not touch. Thus you still carried the hand neither on the clergy, neither on the University, neither on the bar, neither on the national militia, nor on the commercial corporations; it seems to to me, however, that there is more than one dangerous element.

MACHIAVEL.

I then to say all at the same time to you. Let us come from following the national militia, because I should not have any more with me to occupy some; their dissolution was necessarily one of the first acts of my capacity. The organization of a guard citizen could not be reconciled with the existence of a regular army, because, the citizens out of weapons could, at a given moment, to transform itself into factious. This point, however, is not without difficulty. The national guard is an useless institution, but it bears a popular name. In the military States, it flatters the puerile instincts of certain middle-class classes, which, by one through rather ridiculous, combine the taste of the warlike demonstrations to the commercial practices.It is an inoffensive prejudice there, it would be all the more awkward to run up against it, that the prince should not never seem to separate his interests from those of the city which believes to find a guarantee in the armament of its inhabitants.

MONTESQUIEU.

But since you dissolve this militia.

MACHIAVEL.

I dissolve it to reorganize it on other bases. Essence is to put it under the immediate orders of the civil representatives of authority and to remove the prerogative to him to recruit its chiefs by the way of the election; it is what I do. I will not organize it, moreover, that in the places where it will be appropriate, and I reserve myself the right to dissolve it again and to still restore it on other bases, if the circumstances require it. I do not have anything to say to you moreover on this point. In what touches the University, the current order of things satisfies me about. You are not unaware of, indeed, that these large bodies of teaching are not organized more, today, as they were it formerly. They have almost everywhere, ensures me one, lost their autonomy and are nothing any more but public services with the load of the State. However, as I said it more to you once, where is the State, there is the prince; the moral direction of the publicly-owned establishments is between its hands; these are the agents which inspire the spirit of youth. The chiefs as the members of the teaching bodies of all the degrees are named by the government, they are attached there, they depend on it, that is enough; if there remains that and there some traces of independent organization in some public school or Academy that it is, it is easy to bring back it to the common center of unit and direction. It is the business of a payment or even of a simple ministerial decree. I pass to car-to wing on details which cannot call my glances more closely. However, I should not give up this subject without you to say that I look like very-important to proscribe, in the teaching of the right, the studies of constitutional policy.

MONTESQUIEU.

You indeed have rather good reasons for that.

MACHIAVEL.

My reasons are extremely simple; I do not want that with leaving the schools, young people deal with policy wrongly and through; that with eighteen years, one mingles to make constitutions like one makes tragedies. Such a teaching can only distort the ideas of youth and prematurely initiate it with matters which exceed the measurement of its reason. It is with these badly digested concepts, badly included/understood, that one prepares false statesmen, utopians whose temerities of spirit result later intemerities of action.

One needs that the generations which are born under my reign are high in the respect of the established institutions, in the love of the prince; also I would make a rather clever use of the capacity of direction which belongs to me on teaching: I believe that in general in the schools one is a great wrong, it is to neglect the contemporary history. It is at least as essential to know its time as that of P.ricl.s; I would like that the history of my reign was taught, me living, in the schools. Thus a new prince enters the heart of a generation.

MONTESQUIEU.

It would be, of course, a perpetual apology for all your acts?

MACHIAVEL.

It is obvious that I would not be made disparage. The purpose of the other means that I would employ would be to react against the free teaching, which one cannot directly proscribe. The universities contain armies of professors which one can, apart from the classes, to use the leisures for the propagation of the good doctrines. I would make them open free courses in all the important cities, I would thus mobilize the instruction and the influence of the government.

MONTESQUIEU.

In other words, you absorb, you confiscate with your profit even the last gleams of an independent thought.

MACHIAVEL.

I do not confiscate anything the whole.

MONTESQUIEU.

Do you allow other professors that yours to popularize science by the same means and that without patent, authorization?

MACHIAVEL.

What! do you thus want that I authorize clubs?

MONTESQUIEU.

Not, thus pass to another object.

MACHIAVEL.

Among the multitude of lawful measurements that the safety of my government claims, you drew my attention to the bar; it is to extend the action of my hand beyond what is necessary for themoment; I touch here besides with civil interests, and you know that in this matter, my code of conduct is to abstain from as much as possible. In the States where the bar is made up in corporation, the justiciable ones look the independence of this institution like a guarantee inseparable from the right of defense in front of the courts, which it is of their honor, their interest or their life. It is quite serious to intervene here, because the opinion could be alarmed on a cry that would not fail to throw the very whole corporation. However, I am not unaware of that this order will be a hearth of influences constantly hostile to my capacity. This profession, you know it better than me, Montesquieu, develops cold and obstinate characters in their principles, of the spirits whose tendency is to seek in the acts of the capacity the element of pure legality. The lawyer does not have with the same degree as the magistrate the high direction of the social needs; he sees the law of too near, and by too small sides to have of it the feeling right, while the magistrateà.

MONTESQUIEU.

Save the apology.

MACHIAVEL.

Yes, because I do not forget that I am in front of downward of these large magistrates who supported with such an amount of glare, in France, the throne of monarchy.

MONTESQUIEU.

And which showed seldom easy with the recording edicts, when they violated the law of the State.

MACHIAVEL.

Thus they ended up reversing the State itself. I do not want that my courses of justice are Parliaments and that lawyers, under the immunity of their dress, make there of the policy. The great man of the century, to which your fatherland had the honor to give the day, said: I want that one can cut the language to a lawyer who says evil of the government. Modern manners are softer, I would not go up to that point. To the first day, and in the circumstances which will be appropriate, I will restrict myself to make a quite simple thing: I will return a decree which, while respecting the independence of the corporation, will subject nevertheless lawyers to receive from the sovereign the nomination of their profession. In the explanatory memorandum of my decree, it will not be, I believe, quite difficult to show with justiciable that they will find in this mode of nomination a guarantee more serious than when the corporation recruits itself, i.e. with elements necessarily a little confused.

MONTESQUIEU.

It is only too true that one can lend to the most hateful measurements, the language of the reason! But let us see, that you will make now with regard to the clergy? Here is an institution which depends on the State only by one side and which concerns a spiritual power, whose si.ge is elsewhere than on your premise. I do not know anything more dangerous for your capacity, I declare it to you, but this power which speaks in the name of the sky and of which the roots are everywhere on the ground: do not forget that the Christian word is a word of freedom. Undoubtedly, the laws of the State established a major demarcation between the religious authority and the political authority; undoubtedly, the word of the ministers of religion will be made hear only in the name of the Gospel; but the divine spiritualism which emerges some is the stone of obstacle of the political materialism. It is this so humble and so soft book which destroyed alone and the Romain empire, and the cesarism, and its power. The frankly Christian nations will always escape the despotism, because Christianity raises the dignity of the too high man so that the despotism can reach it, because it develops moral fibres on which the human capacity does not have a catch [10]. Take guard with the priest: it depends only on God, and its influence is everywhere, in the sanctuary, the family, the school. You cannot anything on him: its hierarchy is not yours, it obeys a constitution which is sliced neither by the law, nor by the sword. If you reign on a catholic nation and that you have the clergy for enemy, you will perish early or late, when well even the whole people would be for you. MACHIAVEL.

I do not know too much why you like it to make of the priest an apostle of freedom. I never saw that, neither in old times, nor in modern times; I always found in priesthood a natural support of the absolute capacity.

Notice it, if, in the interest of my establishment, I had to make concessions with the democratic spirit of my time, if I took the vote for all for base of my capacity, it is only one artifice ordered by times, I do not claim of it less the benefit of the divine right, I am not a less king by the grace of God. For this reason, the clergy must thus support me, because my principles of authority are in conformity with his. If, however, it were factious, if it benefitted from its influence to make a deaf war with my governmentà.

MONTESQUIEU.

Eh well?

MACHIAVEL.

You who speak about the influence of the clergy, you are thus unaware of at which point it knew to be made unpopular in some catholic States? In France, for example, journalism and the press so much lost it in the spirit of the masses, they ruined itsmission so much, that if I reigned in his kingdom you know well what I could do?

MONTESQUIEU.

What?

MACHIAVEL.

I could cause, in the Church, a schism which would break all the bonds which attach the clergy to the court of Rome, because it is there that is the Gordian knot. I would make hold by my press, my publicity agents, my politicians the language that here: "Christianity is independent of Catholicism; what Catholicism defends, Christianity allows it; the independence of the clergy, its tender at the court of Rome, are purely catholic dogmas; such an order of things is a perpetual threat against the safety of the State. The faithful ones of the kingdom should not have for spiritual chief a foreign prince; it is to leave the interior order to the discretion of a power which can be hostile constantly; this hierarchy of the Middle Ages, this supervision of the people in childhood cannot be reconciled any more with the virile genius of modern civilization, with its lights and its independence. Why go to seek in Rome a director of the consciences? Why the chief of the political authority be wouldn't at the same time the chief of the religious authority? Why the sovereign would not be he pontiff?" Such is the language that one could make hold with the press, with the liberal press especially, and what there is theprobable one, it is that the mass of the people would hear it with joy.

MONTESQUIEU.

If you could it believe and if you dare to try a similar company, you would learn promptly and in a way undoubtedly terrible, which is the power of Catholicism, even at the nations where it appears weakened [11].

MACHIAVEL.

To try, large God! But I am sorry, with knees, with our divine Master, to have only exposed these doctrines sacril.ge, inspired by the hatred of Catholicism; but God, who instituted the human capacity, does not defend to him to guarantee companies of the clergy, which enfreint besides precepts of the Gospel when it misses subordination towards the prince. I know well that it will conspire only by one imperceptible influence, but I would find the means of stopping, even within the court of Rome, the intention which directs the influence.

MONTESQUIEU.

How?

MACHIAVEL.

It would be enough for me to indicate finger to Saint-Si.ge the state moral of my people, quivering under the yoke of the Church, candidate to break it, able to dismember itself in its turn of the centre of the catholic unit, to throw itself in the schism of the Greek or Protestant Church.

MONTESQUIEU.

The threat instead of the action!

MACHIAVEL.

How much you are mistaken, Montesquieu, and with what a not do not ignore not my respect for the papal throne! The only role that I want to play, the only mission who belong to me with me sovereign catholic, it would be precisely to be the defender of the Church. In current times, you know it, the temporal power is seriously threatened, and by irreligious hatred, and the ambition of the northern country of Italy. Eh well, I would say to the Holy Father: I will support you against them all, I will save you, it is my duty, it is my mission, but at least do not attack me, support to me your moral influence; this would be too much to ask when myself I would expose my popularity while carrying me for defender of the temporal power, compl.tement discredited today, alas! with the eyes of what is called the European democracy. This danger would not stop me; non-seulement I would hold in failure, on behalf of the close States, very undertaken against the sovereignty of Saint-Si.ge, but if, by misfortune, it were attacked, if the Pope had been suddenly driven out Papal States, as that was already seen, my bayonets only would bring back there and would always maintain there, me lasting.

MONTESQUIEU.

Indeed, it would be a master stroke, because if you held in Rome a perpetual garrison, you would have Saint-Si.ge almost, as if it resided in some province of your kingdom.

MACHIAVEL.

Do you believe that after such a service rendered to papacy, it would refuse to support my capacity, that the Pope even, if need be, would refuse to come to crown me in my capital? Are such events without example in the history?

MONTESQUIEU.

Yes, all is seen in the history. But finally, if instead of finding in the pulpit of Saint-Pierre Borgia or Dubois, as you appear to count there, you had opposite you a pope who resisted your intrigues and faced your anger, that would you make?

MACHIAVEL.

Then, it would be necessary well to be solved there, under pretext of defend the temporal power, I would determine his fall.

MONTESQUIEU.

You have what one calls of the genius!

SEVENTEENTH DIALOGUES.

MONTESQUIEU.

I said that you have genius; it is necessary some, really, of a certain kind, to conceive and carry out so many things. I include/understand the apologue of the Wishnou god now; you have hundred arm like the Indian idol, and each one of your fingers touches a spring. In the same way what you do you touch all, will be able also all to see?

MACHIAVEL.

Yes, because I will make to police force a so vast institution, that in the middle of my kingdom half of the men will see the other. Do you allow me some details on the organization of my police force?

MONTESQUIEU.

Made.

MACHIAVEL.

I will start by creating a ministry for the police force, which will be most important of my ministries and which will centralize, so much for outside than for the interior, the many services of which I will equip this part of my administration.

MONTESQUIEU.

But if you do that, your subjects will see immediately that they are wrapped in an appalling network.

MACHIAVEL.

If this ministry displeases, I will abolish it and I will call it, if you want, ministry of State. I will organize besides in the other ministries for the corresponding services, of which the greatest part will be molten, without noise, in what you call today ministry for the interior and Ministry for Foreign Affairs. You hear perfectly that here I do not deal with diplomacy, but only means suitable to ensure my safety against the factions, aswell outside as inside. Eh well, believe it, under this report/ratio, I will find the majority of the monarchs about in the same situation as me, i.e. very-laid out to assist my sights, which would consist in creating services of international police force in the interest of a reciprocal safety. If, like I hardly doubt it, I managed to reach this result, here some of the forms in which my police force would occur outside: Men of pleasures and good company in the courses foreign, to have the eye on the intrigues of the princes and the exiled, revolutionary applicants proscribed of which, at money price, I would not despair to lead some to be used to me as agents of transmission with regard to carried out dark demagogy; establishment of political newspapers in the large capitals, printers and booksellers placed under the same conditions and secretly subsidized more closely to follow, by the press, the movement of the thought.

MONTESQUIEU.

It is not any more against the factions of your kingdom, it is against the heart even of humanity that you will end up conspiring.

MACHIAVEL.

You know it, I am not frightened many the great words. I want that any politician, who will want to go to cabal abroad, can be observed, announced of distance in distance, until his return in my kingdom, where it indeed will be imprisoned so that it is not able to start again. To have better in hand the wire of the revolutionary intrigues, I dream a combination which would be, I believe, rather skilful.

MONTESQUIEU.

And what thus, large God!

MACHIAVEL.

I would like to have a prince of my house, sitted on the steps of my throne, which would play the dissatisfied one. Its mission would consist in being posed as a liberal, a detractor of my government and thus rejoining, to observe them more closely, those which, in the highest rows of my kingdom, could do a little demagogy. With horse on the interior and external intrigues, the prince to which I would entrust this mission would thus make play a game of easily deceived with those which would not be in the secrecy of the comedy.

MONTESQUIEU.

What! it is with a prince of your house which you would entrust of attributions that you classify yourself in the police force?

MACHIAVEL. And why not? I know reigning princes who, in the exile, were attached to the secret police of certain cabinets.

MONTESQUIEU.

If I continue to listen to you, Machiavel, it is to have the last word of this appalling challenge.

MACHIAVEL.

You do not make indignant, Mister de Montesquieu; in the Spirit of the laws, you called me great man [12].

MONTESQUIEU.

You do it dearly to me expier; it is for my punishment that I listen to you. Pass most quickly that you will be able on so much of sinister details.

MACHIAVEL.

Inside, I am obliged to restore the black cabinet.

MONTESQUIEU.

Restore.

MACHIAVEL.

Your best kings made use of it. It is not necessary that the secrecy of the letters can be used to cover plots.

MONTESQUIEU.

It is there what makes you tremble, I include/understand it.

MACHIAVEL.

You are mistaken, because there will be plots under my reign: it is necessary that there is.

MONTESQUIEU.

What is this still?

MACHIAVEL.

There will be perhaps true plots, I do not answer about it; but undoubtedly there will be simulated plots. At certain times, it can be an excellent means to excite the sympathy of the people in favour of the prince, when its popularity decrease. By intimidating the public spirit one obtains, if need be, by there, measurements of rigour which one wants, or one maintains those which exist. The false conspiracies, of which, of course, oneshould use only with greatest measurement, still have another advantage: it is that they make it possible to discover the real plots, by giving place to searchings which result in seeking the trace of everywhere what one suspects.

Nothing is more invaluable than the life of the sovereign: one needs that it is surrounded innumerable guarantees, i.e. of innumerable agents, but it is necessary at the same time as this secret militia is rather skilfully dissimulated so that the sovereign does not seem to be afraid when it is shown in public. It was said to me that in Europe the precautions in this respect were improved so much, that a prince who leaves in the streets, could have the air of an ordinary person, which walks, without guard, in crowd, whereas it is surrounded of two or three thousand guards.

I hear, of the remainder, that my police force is strewn in all the rows with the company. There will be secret meeting, no committee, not of living room, not of intimate hearth where it is not an ear to collect what is said in any place, at any hour. Alas, for those which handled the capacity, it is an astonishing phenomenon that the facility with which the men are made the informers from/to each other. What is more astonishing still, it is the faculty of observation and analysis which develops at those which give a report on the political police force; you do not have any idea of their tricks, their disguises, their instincts, passion which they bring in their research, of their patience, their impenetrability; will there are men of all the rows which make this trade, how say to you I? by a kind of love of art.

MONTESQUIEU.

Ah! draw the curtain!

MACHIAVEL.

Yes, because there is, in the hollows, of the capacity, the secrecies which terrify the glance. I save darker things to you than did not hear you. With the system that I will organize, I compl.tement will so compl.tement be informed, whom I will be able to tolerate even of the guilty intrigues, because at each minute of the day I will have the capacity to stop them.

MONTESQUIEU.

To tolerate, and why?

MACHIAVEL.

Because in the European States the absolute monarch should not indiscreetly use of the force; because there is always, in the content of the company, of the underground activities on which one can nothing when they are not formulated; because it isnecessary to avoid with great care to alarm the opinion on the safety of the capacity; because the parties are satisfied with murmurs, of inoffensive teasings, when they are reduced to the impotence and that to claim to disarm until their bad mood, would be a madness. One will thus intend them to complain, that and there, in the newspapers, the books; they will test allusions against the government in some speeches or some pleas; they will make, under various pretexts, some small demonstrations of existence; all that will be quite timid, I swear it to you, and the public if it is informed by it, will hardly be tempted but to laugh at it. One will find me well good to support that, I will pass for too d.bonnaire; for this reason I will tolerate what, of course, will appear to me to be able to be it without any danger: I do not even want as one can say that my government is ombrageux.

MONTESQUIEU.

This language recalls me that you left a gap, and an extremely serious gap, in your decrees.

MACHIAVEL.

Which?

MONTESQUIEU.

You did not touch with the personal freedom.

MACHIAVEL.

I will not touch there.

MONTESQUIEU.

Do you believe it? If you reserved yourselves faculty to tolerate, you mainly reserved yourselves the right to prevent all that appears dangerous to you. If the interest of the State, or even a a little pressing care, requires that a man be stopped, at the minute even, in your kingdom, how will be able one to make it if there is in the legislation some law of habeas corpus; if the individual arrest is preceded by certain formalities, certain guarantees? While one proceeds to it, time will occur.

MACHIAVEL.

Allow; if I respect the personal freedom, I do not prohibit myself in this respect some modifications useful for the legal organization.

MONTESQUIEU.

I knew it well.

MACHIAVEL.

Oh! do not triumph, it will be the simplest thing of the world. Who rules in general on the personal freedom, in your parliamentary States?

MONTESQUIEU.

It is a council of magistrates, of which the number and independence are the guarantee of the justiciable ones.

MACHIAVEL.

It is an organization undoubtedly vicious, because, how do you want that with the slowness of the deliberations of a council, justice can have the speed of apprehension necessary on the criminals?

MONTESQUIEU.

Which criminals?

MACHIAVEL.

I speak about people who make murders, flights, crimes and offences justiciable to the common right. It is necessary to give to this jurisdiction the unit of action which is necessary for him: I replace your council by a single magistrate, charged to rule on the arrest of the criminals.

MONTESQUIEU.

But it is not a question here of criminals; using this provision, you threaten freedom of all the citizens; make at least a distinction on the title of the charge.

MACHIAVEL.

It is precisely what I do not want to do. That which undertakes something against the government is not as much and more culprit that that which commits a crime or an ordinary offence? Does passion or misery attenuate many faults, but what forces people to deal with policy? Also I do not want any more distinction between the common law crimes and the political offences. Where thus, the modern governments they have the spirit, to raise species of criminal platforms to their detractors? In my kingdom, the journalist insolate will be confused, in the prisons, with the simple small drainage canal and will appear, beside him, in front of the correctional jurisdiction. The conspirator will sit down in front of the criminal jury, coast at coast with the forger, the murderer. It is an excellent legislative modification there, notice it, because the public opinion, while seeing treating the conspirator with equal of the ordinary criminal, will end up confusing the two kinds in the same contempt. MONTESQUIEU.

You ruin the base even moral smell; but what imports you? What astonishes me, be that you preserve a criminal jury.

MACHIAVEL.

In the States centralized like mine, they are the public civils servant who designate the members of the jury. As regards simple political offence, my Minister for justice will be able, when it is needed, to always compose the room of the judges called to know some.

MONTESQUIEU.

Your interior legislation is irreproachable; it is time to pass to other objects.

III PART.

EIGHTEENTH DIALOGUE.

MONTESQUIEU.

Until now you dealt only of the shapes of your government and the laws of rigour, necessary to maintain it. It is much; it is nothing still. It remains you to solve most difficult of all the problems, for a sovereign who wants to affect the absolute capacity in a European State, worked with representative manners.

MACHIAVEL.

Which is thus this problem?

MONTESQUIEU.

It is that of your finances.

MACHIAVEL.

This question did not remain foreign with my concerns, because I remember to have said to you that all, ultimately, would be solved by a question of figures.

MONTESQUIEU.

Extremely well, but here it is nature even things which will resist to you.

MACHIAVEL.

You worry me, I acknowledge it to you, because I go back to onecentury of cruelty under the report/ratio of the political economy and I very little hear thing with these matters.

MONTESQUIEU.

I reassure myself for you. Allow me however to address a question to you. I remember to have written, in the Spirit of the laws, that the absolute monarch was compels, by the principle of his government, to impose only weak tributes on his subjects [13]. Will you at least give to yours this satisfaction? MACHIAVEL.

I does not engage there and I do not know anything, in truth, of more contestable than the proposal than you emitted there. How do you want that the apparatus of the monarchical capacity, the glare and the representation of a large court, can exist without imposing on a nation heavy sacrifices? Your thesis can be true in Turkey, in Persia, which I know! among small people without industry, which would not have the means besides of paying the tax; but in the European companies, where the richness overflows of the sources of work, and presents themselves under as well forms at the tax, where the luxury is a means of government, where the maintenance and the expenditure of all the public services are centralized enter the hands of the State, where all the high loads, all dignities are paid with large expenses, how do you want once again as one limits oneself to moderate tributes, like you say, when, with that, one is a sovereign Master?

MONTESQUIEU.

It is very right and I give up you my thesis, whose true direction has you escaped besides. Thus, your government will be expensive; it is obvious that it will be more expensive than a representative government.

MACHIAVEL.

It is possible.

MONTESQUIEU.

Yes, but it is here that the difficulty starts. I know how the representative governments provide for their financial needs, but I do not have any idea of the means of existence of the absolute capacity in the modern societies. If I question the past, I see tr.s-clairement who it can remain only in the following conditions: it is necessary, initially, that the absolute monarch is a military chief, you undoubtedly recognize it.

MACHIAVEL.

Yes.

MONTESQUIEU.

It is necessary, moreover, that he is conqueror, because it is with the war that he must ask the principal resources which are necessary for him to maintain its ostentation and its armies. If it asked them the tax, it would crush its subjects. You see by there that it is not, because the absolute monarch spends less, that it must spare the tributes, but because the law of its subsistence is elsewhere. However, today, the war does not bring back any more profits to those which do it: it as well as ruins the overcome winners. Here is a source of income which escapes to you.

Remain the taxes, but, of course, the absolute prince must be able to do, in this respect, of the assent of his subjects. In the despotic States, there is a legal fiction which enables them to tax them discretionarily: in right, the sovereign is supposed to have all the goods of his subjects. When it takes something to them, it thus makes only begin again what belongs to him. This way, not of resistance.

Lastly, one needs that the prince can lay out, without discussion as without control, of the resources which the tax got to him. Such are, in this matter, the inevitable mistakes of the absolutism; be appropriate that there would be to make much to return from there there. If the modern people are, as indifferent as say it to you, with the loss of their freedoms, it will not be in the same way when it acts their interests; their interests are related to an exclusive economic mode of the despotism: if you do not have by the arbitrary one in finances, you cannot have it in policy. Your whole reign will collapse on the chapter of the budgets.

MACHIAVEL.

I am extremely quiet on this point, as on the remainder.

MONTESQUIEU.

It is what it is necessary to see; let us go to the fact. The vote of the taxes, by the agents of the nation, is the fundamental rule of the modern States: will you accept the vote of the tax?

MACHIAVEL.

Why not?

MONTESQUIEU.

Oh! take guard, this principle is the dedication more the express of the sovereignty of the nation; because to recognize the right to him to vote the tax, it is him to admit that to refuse it, to limit it, reduce to nothing the means of action prince, and,consequently, to destroy it itself, with the need.

MACHIAVEL.

You are categorical. Continue.

MONTESQUIEU.

Those which vote the tax are themselves of the taxpayers. Here their interests are narrowly interdependent of those of the nation, in a point where it will have necessarily the open eyes. You will find its agents as not very accommodating on the legislative appropriations, as you found them easy on the chapter of freedoms.

MACHIAVEL.

It is here that the weakness of the argument is discovered: I ask you to take note of two considerations which you forgot. Initially the agents of the nation are paid; taxpayers or not, they are personally satisfied in the vote of the tax.

MONTESQUIEU.

I agree that the combination is practical, and the judicious remark.

MACHIAVEL.

You see the disadvantage of considering the things too systematically; the least skilful modification does all to vary. Perhaps you would be right if I supported my capacity on the aristocracy, or the middle-class classes which could, at a given time, to refuse me their contest; but, in the second place, I have as a base of action the proletariat, of which the mass does not have anything. The loads of the State almost do not weigh on it, and I will make even so that they do not weigh there at all. Tax measurements will worry the working classes little; they will not reach them.

MONTESQUIEU.

If I included/understood well, this is to tr.s-clair: you make pay with those which have, by the sovereign will of those which do not have. It is the ransom which the number and poverty impose on the richness.

MACHIAVEL.

Isn't this right?

MONTESQUIEU.

It is not even true, because in the current companies, from theeconomic point of view, there is neither rich, nor poor. The craftsman of the day before is the middle-class man of the following day, under the terms of the law of work. If you reach the territorial or industrial middle-class, do you know what you do?

You return actually the emancipation by more difficult work, you retain a greater number of workers in the bonds of the proletariat. It is an aberration to believe that the proletarian can benefit from the attacks carried to the production. By impoverishing by tax laws those which have, one creates only factitious situations and, in a given time, one impoverishes even those which do not have.

MACHIAVEL.

They are beautiful theories, but I am well decided with you to oppose some of quite as beautiful, if you want it.

MONTESQUIEU.

Not, because you did not solve the problem yet that I posed to you. Obtain what initially to face the expenditure of absolute sovereignty. It will not be so easy that you think it, even with a legislative room in which you will have the assured majority, even with the absolute power of the popular mandate of which you are invested. Say to me, for example, how you will be able to fold the financial mechanism of the modern States to the requirements of the absolute capacity. I repeat it to you, it is nature even things which resists here. The organized people of Europe surrounded the administration of their finances, of guarantees so narrow, if jealous, if multiplied, that they do not leave more place to perception than with the arbitrary use of the public monies.

MACHIAVEL.

Which is thus this marvellous system?

MONTESQUIEU.

I then to indicate it in a few words to you.

The perfection of the financial system, in modern times, rests on two fundamental bases, control and publicity. It is there that primarily the guarantee of the taxpayers resides. A sovereign could not touch there without saying indirectly on his subjects: You have the order, I want the disorder, I want the darkness in the management of the public funds; I need some because there is a crowd of expenditure which I want to be able to make without your approval, of deficits that I want to be able to mask, of receipts that I want to have the means of disguising or to grow bigger according to the circumstances.

MACHIAVEL.

You begin well.

MONTESQUIEU.

In the free and industrial countries, everyone knows finances, by need, interest and state, and your government in this respect could not mislead anybody.

MACHIAVEL.

Who says to you that one wants to mislead?

MONTESQUIEU.

All the work of the financial administration, if vast and so complicated that it is in its details, ends, in last analysis, with two extremely simple operations, to receive and spend.

It is around these two orders of financial facts, that the multitude of the laws and the special payments revolves, which still have as an aim an extremely simple thing: to make so that the taxpayer pays only the tax necessary and regularly established, to make so that the government can apply the public funds only to expenditure approved by the nation.

I leave side all that relates to the plate and the mode of perception of the tax, the practical means to ensure the entirety of the receipt, the order and the precision in the movement of the public funds; they are there details of accountancy which I do not have to maintain you. I want only to show you how publicity goes with control, in the systems of political finance best organized Europe.

One of the problems most important to solve, was to make leave the darkness compl.tement, to make visible in all the eyes the elements of receipts and expenditure on which the use of public fortune between the hands of the governments is based. This result was reached by the creation of what one calls, in modern language, the budget of the State, which is the outline or the estimated statement of the receipts and the expenditure, planned not for a period of time moved away, but each year for the service of the following year. The annual budget is thus the most important point, and to some extent generator, of the financial standing, which improves or worsens, in proportion of its noted results. The parts which make it up are prepared by the various ministers in the department of which the services to be provided are placed. They take for base of their work the allowances of the former budgets, by introducing there the modifications, additions and cuttings off necessary. The whole is addressed to the Minister for Finance, who centralizes the documents which are transmitted to him, and which submits to the legislative assembly, which one calls the project of the budget. This greatpublic works, printed, reproduced in thousand newspapers, reveals in all the eyes the domestic policy and external of the State, the civil, legal and military administration. It is examined, discussed and voted, by the representatives of the country, after which it is made executory in the same way as the other laws of the State.

MACHIAVEL.

Allow me to admire with which clearness of deduction and which property of terms, completely modern, author of the Spirit of the laws illustrates it knew to get clear, as regards finances, of the a little vague theories and the terms sometimes a little ambiguous of the great work which made it immortal.

MONTESQUIEU.

The Spirit of the laws is not a treaty of finances.

MACHIAVEL.

Your sobriety on this point all the more deserves to be rented, that you could have spoken about it tr.s-comp.temment. Please thus continue, I request from you, I am to you with the greatest interest.

NINETEENTH DIALOGUES.

MONTESQUIEU.

The creation of the budgetary system involved, one can say it, with it all the other financial guarantees which are today the division of the well regulated political companies.

Thus, the first law which is necessarily imposed by the economy of the budget, it is that the required appropriations are in connection with the supplys in hand. It is there balance which must be translated constantly with the eyes by figures real and authentic, and for good to ensure this important result, so that the legislator who votes on the proposals which are made to him does not undergo any drive, one had recourse to a very-wise measurement. One divided the budget general of the State into two distinct budgets: the budget of the expenditure and the budget of the receipts, which must be voted separately, each one by a special law.

In this manner, the attention of the legislator is obliged to concentrate, in turn, separately, on the active situation and passivates, and its determinations in advance are not influenced by the general balance of the receipts and the expenditure.

It controls these two elements scrupulously, and it is, lastly,of their comparison, their narrow harmony, which is born the vote general from the budget.

MACHIAVEL.

All that is chance extremely well, but by the expenditure are contained in an insuperable circle by the legislative vote? Is that possible? Can a room, without paralysing the exercise of the executive power, defending with the sovereign to provide, by emergency measures, with unforeseen expenditure?

MONTESQUIEU.

I see well that that obstructs you, but I then to regret it.

MACHIAVEL.

Isn't faculty, in the constitutional States themselves, formally reserved to the sovereign, to open, by ordinances, of the additional or extraordinary appropriations in the interval of the legislative sessions?

MONTESQUIEU.

It is true, but in a condition, it is that these ordinances are converted into laws with the meeting of the Rooms. It is necessary that their approval intervenes.

MACHIAVEL.

That it intervenes once the expenditure is engaged, to ratify what is made, I would not find it bad.

MONTESQUIEU.

I believe it well; but, unfortunately, one was not held any there. The modern financial legislation most advanced interdict to derogate from the normal forecasts of the budget, otherwise than by laws carrying opening of additional and extraordinary appropriations. The expenditure cannot be committed any more without the intervention of the legislative power.

MACHIAVEL.

But then one cannot control even any more.

MONTESQUIEU.

It appears that if. The modern States reflected that the legislative vote of the budget would end up being illusory, with the abuses the additional and extraordinary appropriations; that ultimately the expenditure was to be able to be limited, when the resources were it naturally; that the political events could not vary the financial facts from one moment to another, and that theinterval of the sessions was not long enough so that it was not always possible to provide for it usefully by a extra-budgetary vote.

One went still further; it was wanted that once the resources voted for such and such services, they could return to the treasure if they were not employed; it was thought that one did not have that the government, while remaining within the limits of the allocated appropriations, could employ the funds of a service to affect them to another, to cover this one, to discover that one, by means of transfer of fundses operated of ministry for ministry, by way of ordinances; because would be to elude their legislative destination and to return, by a clever turning, with the arbitrary financier.

One imagined, to this end, which one calls the speciality of the appropriations by chapters, i.e. the vote of the expenditure takes place by special chapters containing only services correlative and of comparable nature for all the ministries. Thus, for example, chapter A will include/understand, for all the ministries, expenditure A, the chapter B the expenditure B and so on. It results from this combination that the appropriations not employed must be cancelled in the accountancy of the various ministries and be deferred in receipts to the budget of the following year. I do not need to say to you that the ministerial responsibility is the sanction of all these measurements. What forms the crowning of the financial guarantees, it is the establishment of a room of the accounts, left supreme court of appeal in its kind, charged to exert, in a permanent way, the functions of jurisdiction and control on the account, the handling and the use of the public monies, having even for mission of announcing the parts of the financial administration which can be improved from the double point of view of the expenditure and the receipts. These explanations are enough. Don't you find that with an organization like that one, the absolute capacity would be well embarrassed?

MACHIAVEL.

I am still dismayed, I acknowledge it to you, of this financial incursion. You took to me by my weak side: I said to you that I got along very little with these matters, but I would have, believe it well, of the ministers who would know r.torquer all that and to show the danger of the majority of these measurements.

MONTESQUIEU.

Couldn't you it a little yourself?

MACHIAVEL.

If made. With my ministers the care to make beautiful theories; it will be their principal occupation; as for me, I will ratherspeak to you finances in policy that as an economist. There is a thing which you are too much carried to forget, it is that the matter of finances is, of all the parts of the policy, that which lends itself most easily to the maxims of the treaty of the Prince. These States which have budgets so methodically ordered and official writings so well regulates some, make me the effect, of these tradesmen which have perfectly held books and are ruined indeed finally. Who thus has larger budgets than your parliamentary governments? What is more expensive than the democratic Republic of the United States, than the royal Republic of England? It is true that the immense resources of this last power are put at the service of the major policy and best heard.

MONTESQUIEU.

You are not in the question. With what do want you to come from there?

MACHIAVEL.

With this: it is that the rules of the financial administration of the States do not have any relationship with those of the domestic economy, which appears to be the type of your designs.

MONTESQUIEU.

Ah! ah! same distinction as between the policy and morals?

MACHIAVEL.

Isn't Eh well yes, that universally recognized, is not practised? The things were not they not thus even of your time, much however less advanced under this report/ratio, and isn't yourself which said that the States allowed in finances variations whose the son of family would redden more put out of order?

MONTESQUIEU.

It is true, I said that, but if you draw from it an argument favorable to your thesis, it is a true surprise for me.

MACHIAVEL.

You want to say, undoubtedly, that one should not be prevailed of what is done, but what must be done.

MONTESQUIEU.

Precisely.

MACHIAVEL.

I answer that the possible one should be wanted, and that what is done universally cannot not be done. MONTESQUIEU.

This is pure practice, I am appropriate about it.

MACHIAVEL.

And I have some idea that if we made the balance of payments, like you say, my government, any absolute which it is, would be less expensive than yours; but let us leave this argument which would be without interest. You are mistaken really well, if you believe that I afflict myself with the perfection of the systems of finances which you have just explained me. I delighted with you by the regularity of the perception of the tax, the entirety of the receipt; I delighted by the exactitude of the accounts, I by of delighted tr.s-sinc.rement. You thus that it acts, for the absolute monarch believe, to put the hands in the coffers of State, to handle itself the public monies. This wealth of precautions is really puerile. Is the danger -there? Such an amount of better, once again, if the funds are collected, is driven and circulates with the miraculous precision that you announced to me. I precisely hope to make be used for splendour of my reign all these wonders of accountancy, all these organic beauties of the financial matter.

MONTESQUIEU.

You have live it comica. What there is of more astonishing for me in your financial theories, it is that they are in formal contradiction with what you say in this respect in the treaty of the prince, where you recommend severely, not only economy in finances, but even avarice [14]. MACHIAVEL.

If you are astonished some, you are wrong, bus under this point of view times are not any more the same ones, and one of my most essential principles is to adapt to me to times. Let us return and leave an initially little on side, I request from you, which you said to me of your room of the accounts: does this institution belong to the legal order?

MONTESQUIEU.

Not.

MACHIAVEL.

It is thus a purely administrative body. I suppose it perfectly irreproachable. But beautiful advance when it audited all the accounts! Does it prevent that the appropriations are not voted, that the expenditure is not done? Its stops of checking do not learn from it more on the situation that the budgets. It is a room of recording without remonstrance, it is an ingenuous institution, thus do not speak about it, I it maintenances, without concern, such as it can be. MONTESQUIEU.

You maintain it, say you! You thus hope to touch with the other parts of the financial organization?

MACHIAVEL.

You did not doubt it, I imagine. Isn't a financial coup d'etat after a political coup d'etat, inevitable? Won't I be useful myself of the absolute power for that as for the remainder? Which is thus the magic power which would preserve your financial payments? I am as this giant of I do not know which tale, which Pygmies had charged of obstacles during its sleep; while being raised, it broke them without realizing some. The shortly after my advent, there will even be no question of voting the budget; I will issue it extraordinarily, I will dictatorially open the appropriations necessary and I will make them approve by my Council of State.

MONTESQUIEU.

And you will continue thus?

MACHIAVEL.

Not. As of the following year I will return in legality; because I do not intend anything to destroy directly, I said it to you several times already. One regulated before me, I regulate in my turn. You spoke to me about the vote of the budget, by two distinct laws: I regard that as a bad measurement. One realizes well better of a financial standing, when one votes at the same time the budget of the receipts and the budget of the expenditure. My government is a hard government; it does not take only the so invaluable time of the public deliberations is lost in useless discussions. Henceforth the budget of the receipts and that of the expenditure will be included in only one law.

MONTESQUIEU.

Well. And the law which prohibits to open additional appropriations, otherwise than among preliminary vote of the Room?

MACHIAVEL.

I repeal it; you include/understand of it enough the reason.

MONTESQUIEU.

Yes.

MACHIAVEL.

It is a law which would be inapplicable under all the modes. MONTESQUIEU.

And the speciality of the appropriations, the vote by chapters?

MACHIAVEL.

It is impossible to maintain it: one will not vote any more the budget of the expenditure by chapters, but by ministries.

MONTESQUIEU.

That appears large to me like a mountain, because the vote by ministry gives for each one of them only one total to be examined. It is to be useful itself, to filter the public expenditure, of a barrel bottomless instead of a screen.

MACHIAVEL.

That is not exact, because each credit, carried in block, present of the distinct elements, the chapters like you say; they will be examined whether one wants, but one will vote by ministry, with faculty of transfers of a chapter to another.

MONTESQUIEU.

And of ministry with ministry?

MACHIAVEL.

Not, I do not go up to that point; I want to remain within the limits of the need.

MONTESQUIEU.

You are of an achieved moderation, and you believe that these financial innovations will not throw alarm in the country?

MACHIAVEL.

Why do you want that they alarm more than my other political measurements?

MONTESQUIEU.

But because those touch with the material interests of everyone.

MACHIAVEL.

Oh! they are-there quite subtle distinctions.

MONTESQUIEU.

Subtle! I find the word quite selected. Thus do not put subtlety yourself, and say at it simply that a country which cannot defendits freedoms, cannot defend its money.

MACHIAVEL.

Of what could one complain, since I preserved the essential principles of the public law in financial matters? Isn't the tax regularly established, regularly not perceived, the regularly voted appropriations? Isn't all here, like elsewhere, based on the base of the popular vote? Not, undoubtedly, my government is not tiny room to indigence. The people which acclaimed me, non-seulement easily suffer the glare from the throne, but he wants it, he seeks it in a prince who is the expression of his power. He hates really only one thing, it is the richness of his equal.

MONTESQUIEU.

You do not escape yet; you are not with the end; I bring back for you with an inflexible hand to the budget. No matter what you say, its organization even compresses the development of your power. It is a framework which one can cross, but one crosses it only with his risks and dangers. It is published, one knows of them the elements, it remains there like the barometer of the situation.

MACHIAVEL.

Let us stop thus on this point, since you want it.

TWENTIETH DIALOGUE.

MACHIAVEL.

The budget is a framework, say you; yes, but it is an elastic framework which extends as much as one wants it. I will be always with the inside, never with the outside.

MONTESQUIEU.

What do you want to say?

MACHIAVEL.

Is this with me that it rests to teach you how the things occur, even in the States whose budgetary organization is led to its higher point of perfection? The perfection precisely consists in knowing to leave, by clever artifices, of a purely fictitious system of limitation actually.

What your annually voted budget? Not another thing that a provisional payment, that an outline, by about, of the principal financial events. Never the situation is final only after thecompletion of the expenditure that the need gave birth to during the course from the year. One recognizes, in your budgets, I do not know how much species of appropriations which answer all the possible possibilities: the appropriations complementary, additional, extraordinary, provisional, exceptional, which do know I? And each one of these appropriations forms alone as many distinct budgets. However, here how the things occur: the budget general, that which is voted at the beginning of the year, carries on the whole, I suppose, a credit of 800 million. When one arrived at half of the year, the financial facts do not answer the first forecasts already any more; then one presents at the Rooms what one calls an amending budget, and this budget adds 100 million, 150 million with the primitive figure. Arrive then the supplementary budget: it adds to it 50 or 60 million; finally the liquidation comes which adds 15, 20 or 30 million. In short, with the general balance of the accounts, the total variation is a third of the expenditure envisaged. It is on the latter figure that occurs, in the form of homologation, the legislative vote of the Rooms. In this manner, at the end of ten years, one can double and even triple the budget.

MONTESQUIEU.

That this accumulation of expenditure can be the result of your financial improvements, it is that of which I do not doubt, but nothing similar will arrive in the States where your mistakes will be avoided. Furthermore, you are not with the end: it is necessary well, ultimately, that the expenditure is in balance with the receipts; how will you take to you there?

MACHIAVEL.

All consists here, one can say it, in art to group the figures and in certain distinctions of expenditure, with the help of which one obtains the latitude necessary. Thus, for example, the distinction between the ordinary budget and the extraordinary budget can be of a great help. With the favour of this extraordinary word one makes pass rather easily certain contestable expenditure and certain more or less problematic receipts. I have, for example, here 20 million in expenditure; it is necessary to face there by 20 million in receipts: I carry in receipt a war indemnity of 20 million, not yet perceived, but which will be it later, or even I carry in receipt an increase of 20 million in the tax proceeds, which will be carried out the next year. Here are for the receipts; I do not multiply the examples. For the expenditure, one can resort to the contrary process: instead of adding, one deduces. Thus, one will detach, for example, of the budget of the expenditure the expenses of perception of the tax.

MONTESQUIEU.

And under which pretext, I request from you?

MACHIAVEL.

One can say, and with reason, in my opinion, that it is not a national expenditure. One can still, consequently reason, not to make appear in the budget expenditure what costs the provincial and communal service.

MONTESQUIEU.

I do not discuss anything of all that, you can see it; but what do you make receipts which are deficits, and expenditure which you eliminate?

MACHIAVEL.

The great point, in this matter, is the distinction between the ordinary budget and the extraordinary budget. It is with the extraordinary budget that must refer the expenditure which worries you.

MONTESQUIEU.

But finally these two budgets add up and the final figure of the expenditure appears.

MACHIAVEL.

One should not add up; on the contrary. The ordinary budget appears alone; the extraordinary budget is an appendix for which one provides by other means.

MONTESQUIEU.

And which are they?

MACHIAVEL.

Do not make me anticipate. You thus see initially that there is a particular manner to present the budget, to dissimulate in it, if need be, increasing rise. It is not government which is not in the need for thus acting about it; there are inexhaustible resources in the industrial countries, but, as you noticed it, these countries are miserly, suspicious: they dispute on the expenditure most necessary. The financial policy cannot, more than the other, to be played charts on table: one would be stopped with each step; but ultimately, and grace, I agree on it, with the improvement of the budgetary system, all finds myself, all is classified, and if the budget has its mysteries, it has also its clearnesses.

MONTESQUIEU.

But for the initiates only, undoubtedly. I see that you will make financial legislation a formalism as impenetrable as the legalprocedure among Romans, at the time of the twelve tables. But let us continue. Since your expenditure increases, it is necessary well that your resources grow in the same proportion. Will you find, like Jules C.sar, a value of two billion frank in the coffers of State, or will discover you the sources of Potose?

MACHIAVEL.

Your features are extremely clever; I will do what all the possible governments do, I will borrow.

MONTESQUIEU.

It is here that I wanted to bring you. It is certain that it is little of governments which are not in the need for resorting to the loan; but it is certain also that they are obliged to use about it with care; they would not know, without immorality and danger, to burden the generations to come from exorbitant and disproportionate loads with the probable resources. How are made the loans? by issues of titles containing obligation on behalf of the government, to serve as the proportioned revenues with the capital which is versed for him. If the loan is of 5 PC, for example, the State, at the end of twenty years, paid a sum equal to the borrowed capital; at the end of forty years a double sum; at the end of sixty years a triple sum, and, nevertheless, it remains always debtor totality of the same capital. One can add that if the State increased its debt indefinitely, without anything to make to decrease it, it would be led has impossibility of borrowing or with the bankruptcy. These results are easy to seize: it is not country where each one does not include/understand them. Also the modern States wanted to bring a limitation necessary to the increase in taxes. They imagined, to this end, which one called the system of damping, really admirable combination by the simplicity and the so practical mode of his execution. One A creates funds special, whose capitalized resources are intended for a permanent repurchase of the national debt, by successive fractions; so that all the times that the State borrows, it must equip the sinking fund with a certain capital intended to extinguish, in a given time, the new credit. You see that this mode of limitation is indirect, and it is what makes its power. By means of damping, the nation said to its government: you will borrow if you are forced there, that is to say, but you will have to always worry you to face the new obligation which you contract on my behalf. When one is unceasingly obliged to deaden, one looks there with twice before borrowing. If you deaden regularly, I pass your loans to you.

MACHIAVEL.

And why do you want that I deaden, I request from you? Which are the States where damping takes place in a regular way? In England even it is suspended; the example falls from top, I imagine: what is not done nowhere, cannot be done.

MONTESQUIEU.

Thus you remove damping?

MACHIAVEL.

I did not say that, far from it; I will let function this mechanism, and my government will employ the funds which it produces; this combination will have a great advantage. At the time of the presentation of the budget, one will be able, from time to time, to make appear in receipt produces it damping of the following year.

MONTESQUIEU.

And the following year it will appear in expenditure.

MACHIAVEL.

I do not know anything of it, that will depend on the circumstances, because I will regret much that this financial institution cannot go more regularly. My ministers will be explained in this respect extremely painful manner. My God, I do not claim that, under the financial statement, my administration will not have some criticizable sides, but, when the facts are well presented, one passes on many things. The Administration of finances is for much also, do not forget it, a business of press.

MONTESQUIEU.

What this?

MACHIAVEL.

Didn't you say me that the gasoline even of the budget was publicity?

MONTESQUIEU.

Yes.

MACHIAVEL.

Aren't Eh well, the budgets accompanied by reports, reports/ratios, official documents in all the ways? How of resources these public communications do not give they not to the sovereign, when it is surrounded skilful men! I want that my Minister for Finance speaks the language about the figures with an admirable clearness and that its literary style, moreover, that is to say of an irreproachable purity.

It is wise to unceasingly repeat what is true, it is that "the management of the public monies is currently done in the light of the day." This undeniable proposal must be presented in thousand forms; I want that one writes sentences like this one:

"Our system of accountancy, fruit of a long experiment, is characterized by clearness and the certainty from its processes. It puts obstacle at the abuses and does not give to anybody, since the last of the civils servant to the Head of the State itself, the means of diverting the tiniest sum of its destination, or of making an irregular employment of it."

Your language would be spoken: how to better do? and one would say:

"The excellence of the financial system rests on two bases: control and publicity. The control which prevents that only one sum of money can leave with the hands of the taxpayers to enter the public cases, to pass from a case to another case, and to leave there to go between the hands of a creditor of the State, without the legitimacy of its perception, the regularity of its movements, the legitimacy of its employment, being controlled by it by responsible agents, checked judicially by magistrates irremovable, and definitively sanctioned in the legislative accounts of the Room."

MONTESQUIEU.

O Machiavel! you always scoff, but your mocking remark has something of infernal.

MACHIAVEL.

You forget where we are.

MONTESQUIEU.

You defy the sky.

MACHIAVEL.

God probes the hearts.

MONTESQUIEU.

Continue.

MACHIAVEL.

At the beginning of the financial year, the superintendent of finances will state himself as follows:

"Nothing deteriorates, up to now, the forecasts of the current budget. Without having illusions, there are the most serious reasons to hope that, for the first time since many years, the budget, in spite of the service of the loans, will present, inthe final analysis, a real balance. This so desirable result, obtained in exceptionally difficult times, is best evidence than the upswing of public fortune never slowed down."

Is this well dictated?

MONTESQUIEU.

Continue.

MACHIAVEL.

On this subject one will speak about the damping, which worried you a few moments ago, and one will say:

"Damping soon will function. If the project which one conceived in this respect had been suddenly carried out, if the public revenues continued to progress, it would not be impossible only, in the budget who will be introduced in five years, the public accounts did not show one exceeding of receipts."

MONTESQUIEU.

Your hopes are long-term; but in connection with damping, if, after having promised it to put in function, one does nothing of it, that say you?

MACHIAVEL.

It will be said that the moment had not been well chosen, that it is necessary to still wait. One can go much further: advisable economists dispute with damping a real effectiveness. These theories, you know them; I then to point out them to you.

MONTESQUIEU.

It is useless.

MACHIAVEL.

One makes publish these theories by the nonofficial newspapers, one insinuates them oneself, finally a day one can acknowledge them more highly.

MONTESQUIEU.

How! after having recognized the effectiveness of damping before, and to have exalt. the benefits of them!

MACHIAVEL.

But, don't the data of science change? shouldn't an enlightened government follow, little by little, economic progress of its century? MONTESQUIEU.

Nothing peremptory. Let us leave damping. When you will not have been able to hold any of your promises, when you will be overflowed by the expenditure, after having made foresee exceeding receipts, which you will say?

MACHIAVEL.

If need be, one will agree on it boldly. This frankness honours the governments and touches the people, when it emanates from a strong capacity. But, on the other hand, my Minister for Finance will endeavour to remove any significance with the rise in the figure of the expenditure. He will say, which is true: "It is that the financial practice shows that the overdrafts never are entirely confirmed; that a certain quantity of new resources usually occur in the course of the year, in particular by the increase in the tax proceeds; that a considerable portion, moreover, voted appropriations, not having received employment, will be cancelled."

MONTESQUIEU.

Will that arrive?

MACHIAVEL.

Sometimes there is, you know it, in finances of the done everything words, of the stereotyped sentences, which do much effect on the public, calm it, reassure it.

Thus, while presenting with art such or such passive debt, one says: this figure does not have anything exorbitant; it is normal, it is in conformity with the budgetary antecedents; quantify it floating debt does not only have very-reassuring. There is a crowd of similar phrases about which I do not speak to you because it is other practical artifices, more important, to which I must draw your attention.

Initially, in all the official documents it is necessary to insist on the development of prosperity, the commercial activity and progress always crescent of consumption.

The taxpayer is moved less disproportion by the budgets, when these things are repeated to him, and one can repeat to him to satiety, without never it being defied some, so much the authentic writings produce a magic effect on the spirit of the stupid middle-class men. When the balance of the budgets is broken and that one wants, for the following year, to prepare the public spirit with some m.compte, one says in advance, in a report/ratio, the next year the overdraft will be only of so much.

If the overdraft is lower than the forecasts, it is a truetriumph; if it is higher, one says: "the deficit was larger than it had been envisaged, but it had risen with a higher figure the previous year; of made account, the situation is better, because one spent less and however exceptionally difficult circumstances were crossed: the war, food shortage, epidemics, of the crises of unforeseen subsistence, etc"

"But, the next year, the increase in the receipts will allow, according to any probability, to reach a balance since so a long time desired: the debt will be reduced, the suitably balanced budget. This progress will continue, one can hope for it, and, except exceptional occurrences, balance will become the practice of our finances, as it is the rule."

MONTESQUIEU.

It is high comedy; the practice will be as the rule, it will never be caught, because I imagine that, under your reign, there will be always some extraordinary circumstance, some war, some crisis of subsistence.

MACHIAVEL.

I do not know if there will be crises of subsistence; what is certain, it is that I will hold the Almighty the flag of national dignity.

MONTESQUIEU.

It is well the least which you can realize. If you collect glory, one should not you know liking of it, because it is not, between your hands, that a means of government: it is not it which will deaden the debts of your State.

TWENTY AND UNI.ME DIALOGUE.

MACHIAVEL.

I fear that you do not have some prejudice with regard to the loans; they are invaluable in more than one way: they attach the families to the government; they are excellent placements for the private individuals, and the modern economists formally recognize today that, far from impoverishing the States, the national debts enrich them. Do you want to allow me to explain you how?

MONTESQUIEU.

Not, because I believe to know these theories. As you always speak to borrow and never to refund, I would like to know initially from whom you will request so many capital, and in connection with what will ask them to you.

MACHIAVEL.

The external wars are, for that, of a great help. In the great States, they make it possible to borrow 5 or 600 million; one makes in kind spend about it only half or two thirds, and the remainder finds its place in the Treasury, for the expenditure of the interior.

MONTESQUIEU.

Five or six hundred million, you say! And which are the bankers of modern times which can alone negotiate loans whose capital would be all the fortune of certain States?

MACHIAVEL.

Ah! you are still with these rudimentary processes of the loan? It is, enable me to say it to you, almost cruelty, as regards financial economy. One does not borrow today any more from the bankers.

MONTESQUIEU.

And with which thus?

MACHIAVEL.

Year place to pass from the markets with capitalists, who intend themselves to thwart the biddings and of which the small number destroys competition, one addresses oneself on all his subjects: with the rich person, with the poor, the craftsmen, the tradesmen, whoever a sum of money of available has; one opens finally what is called a public subscription, and so that each one can buy revenues, one divides them by coupons of very-small sums. One sells since 10 frank revenue, 5 frank of revenue up to a hundred and thousand frank, a million revenues. The shortly after their emission the value of these titles is in rise, fact precedes, like one says: it is known, and one street on all sides to buy some; it is said that it is is delirious. In a few days the trunks of the Treasury abound; as well money is received as it is not known where to put it; however one arranges oneself to take it, because if the subscription exceeds the capital of the emitted revenues, one can spare a great effect on the opinion.

MONTESQUIEU.

Ah!

MACHIAVEL.

One returns to the latecomers their money. One does that with great noise, with great reinforcement of press. It is the blow of spared theatre. Exceeding amounts sometimes to two or three hundred million: you judge at which point the public spirit isstruck of this confidence of the country in the government.

MONTESQUIEU.

Confidence which is involved in a spirit with unrestrained agiotage, so that I foresee. I had intended to speak, indeed, of this combination, but all, in your mouth, is really phantasmagoric. Eh well, is, you have full money the hands, butà.

MACHIAVEL.

I would have some more still than you do not think, because, at the modern nations, there are great institutions of bank which can lend directly to the State 100 and 200 million to the ordinary rate; the large cities can lend too. At these same nations there are other institutions that one calls institutions of precaution: they are savings banks, relief funds, pension funds. The State be accustomed to requiring that their capital, which is immense, which can amount sometimes to 5 or 600 million, are versed in the Treasury where they function with the common mass, realising weak interests paid with those which deposit them.

Moreover, the governments can get funds exactly like the bankers. They deliver on their case of the demand notes for sums of two or three hundred million, kinds of bill of exchanges on which one throws oneself before they do not enter in circulation.

MONTESQUIEU.

Thus allow me to stop you: you only speak to borrow or draw from the bill of exchanges; will you never be worried to pay something?

MACHIAVEL.

It is wise to still say to you that one can, where necessary, to sell the fields of the State.

MONTESQUIEU.

Ah, you are sold now! but won't you be worried to pay finally?

MACHIAVEL.

Without any doubt; it is time to say to you now how one faces the liability.

MONTESQUIEU.

You say, one faces the liability: I would like an expression more exact.

MACHIAVEL. I am useful myself of this expression because I believe it of a real exactitude. One cannot always extinguish the liability, but one can face him; the word is even very-energetic, because the liability is a frightening enemy.

MONTESQUIEU.

Eh well, how will you face him?

MACHIAVEL.

In this respect the means very-are varied: there is initially the tax.

MONTESQUIEU.

I.e. liability employed to pay the liability.

MACHIAVEL.

You speak to me as an economist and not as a financier. Do not confuse. With the product of a tax one can really pay. I know that the tax makes shout; if that which one established embarrassment, one finds some another, or one restores the same one under another name. There is a great art, you know it, to find the points vulnerable of the taxable product.

MONTESQUIEU.

You will have crushed it soon, I imagine.

MACHIAVEL.

There are other means: there is what one calls conversion.

MONTESQUIEU.

Ah! ah!

MACHIAVEL.

This relates to the debt which one calls consolidated, i.e. with that which comes from the emission of the loans. One says to the shareholders of the State, for example: so far I paid you 5 PC of your money; it was the rate of your revenue. I intend more to pay you that the 4 1/2 or the 4 PC Consentez to this reduction or receive the refunding of the capital that you lent to me.

MONTESQUIEU.

But if one returns really the money, I find the process still rather honest.

MACHIAVEL. Undoubtedly it is returned, if it is claimed; but very-little is concerned with it; the shareholders have their practices; their funds are invested; they have confidence in the State; they like better a less income and a sure placement. If everyone required its money it is obvious that the Treasury would be taken with the lace. That never arrives and one gets rid by this means of a liability of several hundreds of million.

MONTESQUIEU.

It is one dispatch immoral, no matter what one says; a compulsory loan which depresses public confidence.

MACHIAVEL.

You do not know the shareholders. Here another combination relating to another kind of debt. I a few moments ago said to you that the State had at its disposal the funds of the provident funds and that it made use of it by paying the rent, except returning them to first requisition. If, after having handled them a long time, it is not able any more to return them, it consolidates the debt which floats in its hands.

MONTESQUIEU.

I know what that means; the State called to the depositors: You want your money, I do not have it more; here is of the revenue.

MACHIAVEL.

Precisely, and it consolidates same manner all the debts to which it cannot be enough any more. It consolidate the Treasury bill du Tr.sor, the debt contract towards the city, towards the bank, finally all those which form it that one call tr.s-pittoresquement the debt floating, because it himself compose of credit which have not some plate given and which be in a term more or less bring closer.

MONTESQUIEU.

You have average singular to release the State.

MACHIAVEL.

What can you reproach me if I do only what the others do?

MONTESQUIEU.

Oh! if everyone does it, it would be necessary to be quite hard, indeed, to reproach it Machiavel.

MACHIAVEL.

I do not indicate only to it thousandth part of the combinationsto you which one can employ. Far from fearing the increase in the perpetual revenues, I would like that whole public fortune was in revenues; I would make so that the cities, the communes, the publicly-owned establishments convert into revenues their movable buildings or their capital. It is the interest even of my dynasty which would order me these financial measurements. There would not be in my kingdom one ecu which was not due by a wire to my existence.

MONTESQUIEU.

But from this point of view even, from this fatal point of view, will you achieve your goal? Don't you walk, in the most direct manner, with your ruin through the ruin of the State? Don't you know that at all the nations of Europe there are vast markets of public funds, where prudence, wisdom, the probity of the governments is put at the bidding? With the way in which you direct your finances, your funds would be pushed back with loss of the foreign markets and they would fall to the lowest courses, even with the Stock Exchange of your kingdom.

MACHIAVEL.

It is an obvious error. A glorious government, as would be mine, can only enjoy a great credit outside. Inside, its strength would dominate the apprehensions. With the surplus I would not like that the credit of my State depended on fright of some tallow merchants; I would dominate the Stock Exchange by the Stock Exchange.

MONTESQUIEU.

What is this still?

MACHIAVEL.

I would have gigantic credit institutions instituted seemingly to lend to the industry, but of which the most real function would consist in supporting the revenue. Able to throw for 400 or 500 million titles on the place, or to rarefy the market in the same proportions, these monopolies financial would be always Masters of the courses. What do you say this combination?

MONTESQUIEU.

Good bargains that your ministers, your favourites, your mistresses will make in these houses! Will your government thus play purse with the secrecies of the State?

MACHIAVEL.

What you say!

MONTESQUIEU. Thus explain differently the existence of these houses. As long as you were only on the ground of the doctrines, one could be mistaken on the true name in your policy, since you are with the applications, one cannot it more. Your government will be single in the history; one will be able to never calumniate it.

MACHIAVEL.

If somebody in my kingdom warned statement what you make it clear, it disappears as by the effect of the lightning.

MONTESQUIEU.

The lightning is a beautiful argument; you are happy to have it at your disposal. In did you finish with finances?

MACHIAVEL.

Yes.

MONTESQUIEU.

The hour advances with great steps.

LEFT IVe.

VINGT-DEUXI.ME DIALOGUES.

MONTESQUIEU.

Before to have heard to you, I knew well neither the spirit of the laws, nor the spirit of finances. I am indebted for you to have taught me one and the other. You have between the hands the greatest power of modern times, the money. You can get some about as far as you want. With so extraordinary resources you will make large things, undoubtedly; it is the case to show finally that the good can leave the evil.

MACHIAVEL.

It is what I intend to show you indeed.

MONTESQUIEU.

Eh well, let us see.

MACHIAVEL.

Largest of my benefits will be initially to have given interior peace to my people. Under my reign bad passions are compressed, the goods are reassured and the malicious ones tremble. I returned to a country torn before me by the factions, freedom,dignity, the force.

MONTESQUIEU.

After having changed so many things, wouldn't you have come from there to change the direction of the words?

MACHIAVEL.

Freedom does not consist in the licence, not more than dignity and the force do not consist in the insurrection and the disorder. My peaceful empire with the inside, will be glorious with the outside.

MONTESQUIEU.

How?

MACHIAVEL.

I will make the war in the four parts of the world. I will cross the Alps, like Annibal; I will guerroierai in India, like Alexandre; in Lybie, like Scipion; I will go from the Atlas in Taurus, of the edges of Gange in the Mississippi, the Mississippi to the Amour river. The Great Wall of China will fall in front of my name; my victorious legions will defend, in Jerusalem, the tomb of the Saver; in Rome, the vicar of Jesus-Christ; their steps will press in Peru the dust of Incas, in Egypt ashes of S.sostris; in M.sopotamie those of Nabuchodonosor. Descendant of C.sar, Auguste and Charlemagne, I will avenge, on the edges of the Danube, the defeat of Varus; on the edges of Adige, the rout of Cannes; on the Baltic, the insults of the Norman ones.

MONTESQUIEU.

Condescend to stop, I entreat you. If you thus avenge the defeats for all the large captains, will not be enough you there. I will not compare to you in Louis XIV, to whom Boileau said: Large king ceases overcoming or I cease writing; this comparison would humiliate you. I grant to you that no hero of antiquity or modern times, could be put in parallel with you.

But it is not that which it acts: The war in itself is an evil; it is used in your hands to make still support a larger evil, the constraint; but where thus is, in all this, it although you promised to me to make?

MACHIAVEL.

It is not here the case of .quivoquer; glory is already by itself a large good; it is most powerful of the accumulated capital; a sovereign who has glory has all the remainder. He is the terror of the close States, the referee of Europe. Its credit is essential invincibly, because, no matter what you said on thesterility of the victories, the force never abdicates its rights. One simulates wars of ideas, one makes display of satisfying and, one fine day, one finishes tr.s-bien by seizing a province which one covets and by imposing a tribute of war on overcome.

MONTESQUIEU.

But, allow, in this system one makes perfectly well act about it thus, if it can; without that, the military trade would be by too denied.

MACHIAVEL.

Per good hour! you see that our ideas start to approach a little.

MONTESQUIEU.

Yes, like the Atlas and Taurus. Let us see the other large things of your reign.

MACHIAVEL.

I do not scorn as far as you appear to believe it a parallel with Louis XIV. I would refer more than one with this monarch; as him I would make gigantic constructions; however, under this report/ratio, my ambition would go much further that his and that that of most famous potentates; I would like to show the people which the monuments whose construction required formerly of the centuries, I them rebuilt, me, in a few years. The palates of the kings my predecessors would fall under the hammer from the demolition contracters to be raised renovated by new forms; I would reverse whole cities, to rebuild them on more regular levels, to obtain more beautiful prospects. You cannot imagine you to which point constructions attach the people to the monarchs. One could say that they forgive easily that one destroys their laws in the condition that one them masonry of the houses. Besides you will see, in one moment, that constructions are used for particularly important objects.

MONTESQUIEU.

After constructions, which will you make?

MACHIAVEL.

You go well quickly: the number of the great actions is not unlimited. Please thus say to me, I request from you, if, from S.sostris to Louis XIV, Pierre Ier, the two cardinal points of the great reigns were not the war and constructions.

MONTESQUIEU.

It is true, but one however sees absolute monarchs who were concerned with give good laws, to improve manners, to introducesimplicity and the decency there. One saw some which was concerned with the order in finances, of the economy; who thought of leaving after them the order, peace, of the durable institutions, sometimes even freedom.

MACHIAVEL.

Oh! all that will be done. You see well that, according to yourself, the absolute monarchs have good.

MONTESQUIEU.

Alas! not too. Try to prove the opposite to me, however.

Do you have some good thing to say to me?

MACHIAVEL.

I would give to the entrepreneurship an extraordinary rise; my reign would be the reign of the businesses. I would launch the speculation in new ways and hitherto unknown factors. My administration would loosen even some of its rings. I would free from the regulation a crowd of industries: the butchers, the bakers and the contractors of theatres would be free.

MONTESQUIEU.

Free to do what?

MACHIAVEL

Free to make bread, free sell meat and free to organize theatrical companies, without the permission of the authority.

MONTESQUIEU.

I do not know what that means. The freedom of industry is of common right among modern people. Don't you have anything of to better learn to me?

MACHIAVEL.

I would deal constantly with the fate of the people. My government would get work to him.

MONTESQUIEU.

Let the people find itself of it, that will be better. The political powers do not have the right to make popularity with the sums of money of their subjects. The public incomes are not other thing that a collective contribution, whose product should be used only for general services; the working classes that one accustoms to count on the State, fall into the depreciation; they lose their energy, their dash, their funds of intellectualindustry. Wage-earning by the State throws them in a kind of serfdom, of which they cannot be raised any more but by destroying the State itself. Your constructions absorb enormous sums in unproductive expenditure; they rarefy the capital, kill small industry, destroy the credit in the sub-bases of the company. The hunger is at the end of all your combinations. Make economies, and you will build afterwards. Control with moderation, justice, control the least possible and the people will not have anything to ask you because it will not need you.

MACHIAVEL.

Ah! that you consider of a cold eye miseries of the people! The principles of my government are quite different; I carry in my heart the suffering beings, the small ones. I am indignant when I see the rich person getting pleasures inaccessible to the greatest number. I will do all that I will be able to improve the material condition of the workers, of the operations, of those which fold under the weight of the social need.

MONTESQUIEU.

Eh well, thus start by their giving the resources which you assign to the emoluments your high-ranking dignitaries, of your ministers, your consular characters. Reserve to them generosities which you lavish without counting in your pages, your courtiers, your mistresses.

Do better, deposit the purple of which the sight is an affront with the equality of the men. You remove from the titles of Majesty, Highness, of Excellence, which enter the proud ears like acute irons. You protective like Cromwell call, but have the Acts of the Apostles; live in the thatched cottage of poor, like Alfred the Large one, sleep in the hospitals, extend you on the bed of the patients like Louis saint. It is too easy to make evangelic charity when one passes his life in the middle of the feasts, when one rests the evening in sumptuous beds, with smart ladieies, when, to its sleeping and with his rising, one has large characters who hasten to put on the shirt to you. Be nondespotic father of family and, patriarch and not prince.

If this role does not suit you, is a chief of a democratic Republic, gives freedom, introduces it into manners, of sharp force, if it is your temperament. Be Lycurgue, are Ag.silas, are Gracque, but I do not know what it is only this soft civilization where all bends, where all is faded beside the prince, where all the spirits are thrown in the same mould, all hearts in the same uniform; I understand that one aspires to reign on men but not on automats.

MACHIAVEL.

Here is a overflow of eloquence which I then not to stop. It is with these sentences that the governments are reversed. MONTESQUIEU.

Alas! You have never other concern but that to maintain to you. To put to the test your love public property, one would have to only require of you to go down from the throne in the name of the hello of the State. The people, of which you are the elected official would have only to express you his will in this respect knowing the case that you make of his sovereignty.

MACHIAVEL.

What a strange question! Isn't this for its although I would resist to him?

MONTESQUIEU.

What do you know some? If the people are above you, of which right do subordinate you his will to yours? If you are freely accepted, if you are not right, but only necessary, why do you await all the force and anything the reason? You make well tremble unceasingly for your reign, because you are those which last one day.

MACHIAVEL.

One day! I will last all my life, and my descendants perhaps after me. You know my political, economic, financial system. Do you want to know the last means with the help of which I will push to the last layers of the ground the roots of my dynasty?

MONTESQUIEU.

Not.

MACHIAVEL.

You refuse to hear me, you are overcome; you, your principles, your school and your century.

MONTESQUIEU.

You insist, speak, but that this maintenance is the last.

VINGT-TROISI.ME DIALOGUES.

MACHIAVEL.

I do not answer any of your oratorical movements. The drives of eloquence have to only make here. To say to a sovereign: would you like to go down from your throne for the happiness of your people, is not this madness? He to still say: since you are an emanation of the popular vote, do you entrust to thesefluctuations, let you discuss, this is possible? Doesn't any capacity made up have for first law to be defended, not only in its interest, but in the interest of the people which it controls? I did not make the greatest sacrifice that it is possible to make with the principles equality modern times? Isn't a government resulting from the vote for all, ultimately, the expression of the will of the greatest number? you will say to me that this principle is destroying public freedoms; what then I to make there? When this principle entered manners, do you know the means from of of tearing off it? And, if it cannot about it be torn off, know you a means of carrying it out in the large European Companies, otherwise than by the arm of only one man. You are severe on the means of government: indicate to me another procedure, and, if there is of it no other that the absolute capacity, say to me how this capacity can separate from the special imperfections to which its principle condemns it.

Not, I am not a Vincent saint of Paule, because my subjects need, not of a evangelic heart, but of an arm; I am either neither Ag.silas, neither Lycurgue, neither Gracque, because I am neither in Spartans, nor at Romans; I am within voluptuous companies, which combine the fury of the pleasures to that of the weapons, transport of the force with those of the directions, which do not want any more authority divine, more paternal authority, more religious brake. This is me which created the world in the medium of which I live? I am such, because it is tel. Would have I it power to stop his slope? Not, I can only prolong his life because it would dissolve more quickly still if it were delivered to itself. I take this company by his defects, because it has only defects to me; if it had virtues, I would take it by his virtues.

But if austere principles can insult with my power, is this thus that they can ignore the real services which I render, my genius and even my size?

I am the arm, I am the sword of the Revolutions which mislays the breath forerunner of the final destruction. I contain foolish forces which do not have of another mobile, at the bottom, that the brutality of the instincts, which run to the plunder under the veil of the principles. If I discipline these forces, if I stop the expansion in my fatherland of it, was this only one century, I did not deserve well of it? then I to even claim with the recognition of the European States which turn the eyes towards me, like worms Osiris which, only, with the power to captivate this quivering crowd? Thus carry your eyes higher and incline you in front of that which carries to its face the fatal sign of human predestination.

MONTESQUIEU.

Exterminating angel, grandson of Tamerlan, reduce the people to the ilotism, you will not prevent that there is not some share of the free hearts which will face you, and their scorn would be enough to safeguard the rights of the human conscience madeunperceivable by God.

MACHIAVEL.

God protects the forts.

MONTESQUIEU.

Thus arrive, I request from you, with the last links of the chain which you forged. Tighten it well, use of the anvil and of the hammer, you can all. God you prot.ge, it is itself which guides your star.

MACHIAVEL.

I have sorrow to include/understand the animation which reigns now in your words. I am thus so hard, me which took for final policy, not violence, but obliteration? you thus reassure, I bring more than one unexpected consolation to you. Only let still take some precautions to me which I believe necessary to my safety, you will see that with those of which I am surrounded, a prince does not have anything to fear events.

Our writings have more than one report/ratio, no matter what you say some, and I believe that a despot who wants to be complete does not have to either exempt itself to read you. Thus, you notice extremely well in the Spirit of the laws which an absolute monarch must have a many Praetorian guard [15]; the opinion is good, I will follow it. My guard would be a third approximately of the manpower of my army. I am large amateur of the conscription which is one of the most beautiful inventions of the French genius, but I believe that it is necessary to improve this institution while trying to retain under the weapons the greatest possible number of those which completed the time of their service. I would reach that point, I believe, while seizing r.sol.ment the species of trade which is done in some States, as in France for example, on voluntary engagements at money price. I would remove this hideous trade and I would honestly exert it myself in the form of a monopoly by creating a case of equipment of the army which would be used to me to call up for the military service by the soft food of the money and to retain there by the same means those which would like to be dedicated exclusively in a military state. MONTESQUIEU.

They are thus species of mercenaries who you aspire to form in your own fatherland!

MACHIAVEL.

Yes, the hatred of the parties will say that, when I am m. only by the good of the people and the interest, moreover so legitimate, of my conservation which is the common good of my subjects. Let us pass to other objects. What will astonish you, it is that I return to constructions. I warned you that we would be brought back there. You will see the political idea which emerges from the vast system of constructions that I undertook; I realize by there an economic theory which did many disasters in certain States of Europe, the theory of the organization of permanent work for the working classes. My reign promises indefinite wages to them. Me dead, my given up system, more work; the people are in strike and go up to the attack of the rich classes. One is in full Jacquerie: industrial disturbance, destruction of the credit, insurrection in my State, rising around him; Europe is on fire. I stop. Say to me if the privileged classes, which tremble well naturally for their fortune, do not make causes common, and the narrowest cause with the working classes to maintain to me, me or my dynasty; if in addition, the interest of European peace will not attach to it all the powers of first order.

The question of constructions which appears mean is thus actually, as you see it, a colossal question. When it is about an object of this importance, the sacrifices should not be spared. Did you notice that almost all my political designs double of a financial combination? It is still what arrives to me here. I will institute a case of public works which I will equip with several hundreds of million with the help of which I will cause with constructions on the whole surface of my kingdom. You guessed my goal: I hold the working jacquerie upright; it is the other army which I need against the factions. But this mass of proletarians which is in my hand, it is not necessary now that it can be turned over against me to the day when it would be without bread. It is with what I appeals by constructions themselves, because what there is of private individual in my combinations, it is that each one of them provides at the same time its corollaries. The workman who builds for me builds at the same time against him the means of defense which I need. Without the knowledge, it drives out itself of the great centers where its presence would worry me; it makes forever impossible the success of the revolutions which are done in the street. The result of great constructions, indeed, is to rarefy space where can live the craftsman, to drive back it in the suburbs, and to make him soon give up them; because the dearness of the subsistence grows with the rise in the rate of the rents. My capital will hardly be livable, for those which live of a daily work, that in the part close to its walls. It is thus not in the districts close to the si.ge of the authorities that the insurrections will be able to be formed. Undoubtedly, there will be around the capital an immense, frightening working population in one day of anger; but constructions which I would raise all would be conceived according to a strategic plan, i.e., that they would deliver passage to great ways where, from one end to another, could circulate the gun. The end of these great ways would be connected to a quantity of barracks, species of bastilles, full with weapons, soldiers and ammunition. It would be necessary that my successor was an idiotic old man or a child to drop itself in front of an insurrection, because, on an order of its hand, somepowder grains would sweep the riot up to twenty miles of the capital. But the blood which runs in my veins is extreme and my race has all the signs of the force. Do you listen to me?

MONTESQUIEU.

Yes.

MACHIAVEL.

But you include/understand well that I do not intend to make the life material difficult to the working population of the capital, and there I meet a shelf, it is undeniable; but the fruitfulness of resources which my government must have me would suggest an idea; it would be to build for the common peoples vast cities where the residences would be at low prices, and where their masses would be joined together by troops as in vast families.

MONTESQUIEU.

Traps!

MACHIAVEL.

Oh! the spirit of denigration, the keen hatred of the parties will not fail to disparage my institutions. One will say what you say. Little imports me, if the means does not succeed one will find another of them.

I should not give up the chapter of constructions without mentioning a quite unimportant detail seemingly, but what is there the unimportant one in policy? It is necessary that the innumerable buildings that I will build are marked with my name, that attributes there are found, low-reliefs, groups which point out a subject of my history. My weapons, my figure must be interlaced everywhere. Here, in fact angels will support my crown, further, of the statues of the justice and the wisdom which will support my initial. These points are of the last importance, I hold to with it primarily.

It is by these signs, by these embl.mes that the person of the sovereign is always present; one lives with him, his memory, his thought. The feeling of its absolute sovereignty enters the most rebellious spirits as the water drop which fall without delay from the rock hollow the foot of granite. Consequently reason I want that my statue, my bust, my portraits are in all the publicly-owned establishments, in the audience of the courts especially; whether one represents me in royal costume or with horse.

MONTESQUIEU.

Beside the image of Christ.

MACHIAVEL.

Not, undoubtedly, but opposite; because the sovereign power is an image of the divine power. My image is combined thus with that of Providence and justice.

MONTESQUIEU.

It is necessary that justice itself carries your delivered. You are not a Christian, you are a Greek emperor of the Lower Empire.

MACHIAVEL.

I am a catholic, apostolic and Roman emperor. By the same reasons as those which I have just deduced you, I want that one gives my name, the name Royal, with the publicly-owned establishments of some nature which they are. Royal court, royal Court, royal Academy, royal legislative Body, royal Senate, Council of royal State; as far as possible this same term will be given to the civils servant, to the servants, to the official personnel which surrounds the government. Lieutenant of the king, archbishop of the king, actor of the king, judges the king, lawyer of the king. Lastly, the name of royal will be printed with whoever, men or things, will represent a sign of power. My f.te only will be a national and not royal f.te. I still add that it is necessary, as much as possible, that the streets, the public places, the crossroads bear names which point out the historical memories of my reign. If these indications well are followed, one was Caligula or N.ron, one is certain to be printed forever in the memory of the people and to transmit his prestige to the most moved back posterity. That things do not have I not still to add! it is necessary that I limit myself.

Because which could all say without a mortal trouble? [16].

Arrived to me here at the small means; I regret it, because these things are perhaps not worthy of your attention, but, for me, they are vital.

The bureaucracy is, says one, a wound of the monarchical governments; I do not believe anything of it. They are thousands of servants who are naturally attached to the existing order of things. I have an army of soldiers, an army of judges, an army of workmen, I want an army of employees.

MONTESQUIEU.

You try hard any more nothing to justify.

MACHIAVEL.

In I have it time?

MONTESQUIEU. Not, pass.

MACHIAVEL.

In the States which were monarchical, and they all it have at least once be, I noted that there was a true frenzy for the cords, for the ribbons. These things do not cost almost anything to the prince and it can make the happy ones, better than that, the faithful ones, by means of some some gold or silver rattle, rolls of material. Little would be necessary of it, in truth, that I did not decorate without exception those which would require it of me. A decorated man is a given man. I would make these marks of distinction a rallying sign for the devoted subjects; I would have, I believe well, at this price, the eleven twelfths of my kingdom. I realize by there, as much as I it then, the instincts of equality of the nation. Notice this: the more one nation in general holds with the equality, the more the individuals have passion for the distinctions. It is thus there means of action of which it would be too clumsy to be deprived. Well far in consequence of giving up the titles, as you advised it to me, I would multiply them around me at the same time as dignities. I want in my court the label of Louis XIV, the domestic hierarchy of Constantin, a severe diplomatic formalism, an imposing ceremonial; they are infallible means of government there on the spirit of the masses. Through all that, the sovereign seems God.

It is ensured me that in the most democratic States seemingly by the ideas, the old monarchical nobility did not almost lose anything of its prestige. I would give myself for chamberlains the gentilhommes older rock. Many antiques names would undoubtedly be extinct; under the terms of my sovereign capacity, I would revive them with the titles, and one would find at my court the great names of the history since Charlemagne.

It is possible that these designs appear odd to you, but what I affirm you, it is that they will make more for the consolidation of my dynasty than the wisest laws. The worship of the prince is a kind of religion, and, like all the possible religions, this worship imposes contradictions and mysteries above the reason [17]. Each one of my acts, some unexplainable that it is seemingly, proceeds of a calculation whose single object is my safety and that of my dynasty. As I say it, moreover, in the Treaty of the Prince, which is really difficult, it is to acquire the capacity; but it is easy to preserve it, because it is all in all enough to remove what harms and to establish what prot.ge. The essential feature of my policy, as you could see it, was to return to me essential [18]; I destroyed as many organized forces than it was necessary it so that nothing could go any more without me, so that the same enemies of my capacity trembled to reverse it.

What does not remain to be made to me now does not consist any more but in the development of the moral means who are in germ inmy institutions. My reign is a reign of pleasures; you do not defend me to brighten my people by plays, by festivals; it by that I is there softened manners. One cannot be dissimulated that this century is not one century of money; the needs doubled, the luxury ruins the families; of all shares one aspires to the material pleasures; it would be necessary that a sovereign was hardly of his time not to know to make turn to his profit this universal passion of the money and this sensual fury which consumes the men today. Misery the greenhouse as in a vice, lust the press; the ambition devours them, they are with me. But when I speak thus, at the bottom it is the interest of my people which guide me. Yes, I will make leave the good the evil; I will exploit the materialism with the profit of the harmony and civilization; I will extinguish political passions of the men by alleviating the ambitions, covetousnesses and the needs. I claim to have for servants of my reign those which, under the preceding governments, will have made the most noise in the name of freedom. The most austere virtues are like that of the woman of Mona Lisa; it is enough to always double the price of the defeat. Those which will resist the money will not resist the honors; those which will resist the honors will not resist the money. While seeing falling in their turn those which one believed purest, the public opinion will weaken so much so that it will end up abdicating compl.tement. How will one be able to complain ultimately? I will be rigorous only for what will have milked with the policy; I will persecute only this passion; I will even secretly support the others by the thousand tunnels available to the absolute capacity.

MONTESQUIEU.

After having destroyed the political conscience, you were to undertake to destroy the moral conscience; you killed the company, now you kill the man. Liked God who your words resound until on the ground; never brighter refutation of your own doctrines would not have struck human ears.

MACHIAVEL.

Let finish to me.

VINGT-QUATRI.ME DIALOGUES.

MACHIAVEL.

It now only remains me to indicate certain characteristics in my manner to you of acting, certain practices of control who will give to my government his last aspect.

Initially, I want that my intentions are impenetrable even for those which will approach me nearest. I would be, under this report/ratio, like Alexandre VI and the duke of Valentinois,which one said proverbially to the court of Rome, of the first, "that it never made what it said; of the second, whom he never said what he made." I would only communicate my projects to order of it the execution and I would give my orders only to the last moment. Borgia never used about it differently; its ministers themselves did not know anything and one was always tiny room around him with simple conjectures. I have the gift of the immobility, my goal is there; I look on another side, and when it be with my range, I me turn over suddenly and I melt on my prey before it have have the time to throw a cry.

You could not believe which prestige such a power of dissimulation gives the prince. When it is joined to the strength of the action, a superstitious respect surrounds it, its advisers wonder low what will leave its head, the people places his confidence only in him; it personifies in its eyes the Providence whose ways are unknown. When the people see it passing, it thinks with an involuntary terror what it could of a sign of the nape of the neck; the close States are always in fear and marks of respect fill it, because they never know if some very ready company will not melt on them of the day at the following day.

MONTESQUIEU.

You are strong against your people because you hold it under your knee, but if you mislead the States with which you treat as you mislead your subjects, you will be choked soon in the arms of a coalition.

MACHIAVEL.

You make me leave my subject, because I deal here only with my domestic policy; but if you want to know one of the principal means with the help of which I would hold in failure the coalition of foreign hatreds, here: I reign on a powerful kingdom, I said it to you; eh well! I would seek around my States some large country deposed which aspired to be raised, I would raise it entire with the favour of some general war, as that was seen for Sweden, for Prussia, as that can be seen from one day to another for Germany or Italy, and this country, which would live only by me, which would be only one emanation of my existence, me would give, as long as I would be upright, three hundred and thousand men moreover against armed Europe.

MONTESQUIEU.

And the safety of your State at side of which you would thus raise a power rival and consequently enemy in a given time?

MACHIAVEL.

Above all I preserve myself.

MONTESQUIEU. Thus you do not have anything, not even the concern of the destinies of your kingdom [19]?

MACHIAVEL.

Who says that to you? To provide for my safety, is not this to provide at the same time for the hello with my kingdom!

MONTESQUIEU.

Your royal aspect emerges more and more; I want to see it very whole.

MACHIAVEL.

Thus condescend not to stop me.

It of is necessary well that a prince, whatever his force of head, always finds in him the resources of spirit necessary. One of the greatest talents of the statesman consists in adapting the councils than it hears around him. One finds tr.s-souvent in his entourage of the luminous opinions. I would thus assemble tr.s-souvent my council, I would make it discuss, discuss in front of me the most important questions. When the sovereign defies his impressions, or enough resources of language do not have to disguise its true thought, there must remain dumb or speak to only engage more before the discussion. It is very-rare that, in a quite made up council, the true party to be taken in such situation given, is not formulated in manner or other. It is seized and tr.s-souvent one of those which delivered extremely obscurely its opinion is very astonished the following day to see it carried out.

You could see in my institutions and in my acts, which attention I always put to create appearances; it is necessary some in the words as in the acts. The roof of the skill is to make believe in its frankness, when one has a Punic faith. Non-seulement my intentions will be impenetrable but my words will almost always mean the opposite of what they will appear to indicate. The initiates alone will be able to penetrate the direction of the catchwords that at certain times I will drop from the top of the throne; when I say: My reign, it is peace, it is that it will be the war; when I say that I call upon the moral means, it is that I will use of the means of the force. Do you listen to me?

MONTESQUIEU.

Yes.

MACHIAVEL.

You saw that my press has hundred vote and that they speak without delay about the size of my reign, of the enthusiasm of my subjects for their sovereign; that they put at the same time inthe mouth of the public the opinions, the ideas and until the formulas of language which must defray its talks; you also saw that my ministers astonish without slackening the public by undeniable testimonys their work. As for me, I would speak seldom, once the year only, then that and there in some great circumstances. Also each one of my demonstrations would be accomodated, non-seulement in my kingdom, but in whole Europe, like an event.

A prince whose capacity is founded on a democratic basis, must have a looked after language, but however popular. With the need it should not fear to speak as a demagogue, bus after all he is the people, and he must about it have passions. It is necessary to have for him certain attentions, certain flatteries, certain demonstrations of sensitivity which will find place on the occasion. It does not matter that these means appear negligible or puerile with the eyes of the world, the people will not look at there so close and the effect will be produced.

In my work I recommend to the prince to take for type some great man of the time spent, of which it must as much as possible following the traces [20]. These historical assimilations still do much effect on the masses; one grows in their imagination, one is given of sound living the place that the posterity holds for you. One finds besides in the history of these great men of the bringings together, of the useful indications, sometimes of the identical situations, which one draws from the invaluable lesson, because all the great political lessons are in the history. When one found a great man with whom one has analogies, one can still make better: You know that the people like that a prince has the cultivated spirit, that it has the taste of the letters, that it has even the talent of it. Eh well, the prince could better employ his leisures to only write, for example, the history of the great man of times spent, which it took for model. A severe philosophy can tax these things with weakness. When the sovereign is strong they are forgiven to him, and they give him even I do not know which grace.

Besides certain weaknesses, and even certain defects, serve the prince as much as virtues. You could recognize the truth of these observations according to the use which I had to sometimes make of duplicity, and sometimes of violence. It should not be believed, for example, that the vindicatory character of the sovereign can harm to him; quite to the contrary. If it is often convenient to use of leniency or the magnanimity, it is necessary that at certain times its anger dwells too long in a terrible way. The man is the image of God, and the divinity does not have less rigour in her blows than of mercy. When I would have solved the loss of my enemies, I would thus crush them until there remains nothing any more but dust about it. The men are avenged only for the light insults; they cannot anything against the large ones [21]. It is remainder what I expressly say in my book. The prince has only the choice of the instruments which must be used for its ire; he will always find judges ready to sacrificetheir conscience to his projects of revenge or hatred.

Do not fear that the people are never moved by the blows which I will carry. Initially, he likes to feel the strength of the arm who orders, and then he hates naturally what rises, he is delighted instinctively when one strikes above him. Perhaps you do not know well besides with which facility one forgets. When the moment of the rigours passed, it is hardly if these same as one struck remember. In Rome, to the time of the Lower Empire, Tacite reports that the victims ran with I do not know which pleasure ahead of of the torments. You hear perfectly that it is not about nothing similar in modern times; manners became extremely soft: some proscriptions, of the imprisonments, the forfeiture of the civic rights, they are quite light punishments there. It is true that, to arrive at the sovereign power, it was necessary to pour blood and to violate many rights; but, I repeat it to you, very forgets myself. The least cajolery of the prince, some good processes on behalf of its ministers or of its agents, will be accomodated with the marks of largest the recognition.

If it is essential to punish with an inflexible rigour, it is necessary to reward with same punctuality: it is what I would never fail to do. Whoever would have rendered a service to my government, would be rewarded as of the following day. The places, the distinctions, greatest dignities, would form as many unquestionable stages for whoever would be in possession to serve my policy usefully. In the army, in the magistrature, all public employment, advance would be calculated on the nuance of the opinion and the degree of zeal to my government. You are dumb. MONTESQUIEU.

Continue.

MACHIAVEL.

I return on certain defects and even on some through spirit, which I look like necessary to the prince. The handling of the capacity is a formidable thing. If skilful that is a sovereign, if infallible that is its glance and so vigorous that is its decision, there is still an immense risk in his existence. It is necessary to be superstitious. Keep you to believe that this is of light consequence. It is, in the life of the princes, the so difficult situations, the so serious moments, that human prudence does not count any more. In these cases, it is almost necessary to play die its resolutions. The party that I indicate, and that I would follow, consist, in certain economic situations, to be attached to historical dates, to consult happy birthdays, to put such or such bold resolution under auspices the one day when a victory was gained, makes a blow of happy hand. I must say to you that the superstition has another very large advantage; the people know this tendency. These combinations augurales often succeed; they should also be employed when one is sure success. The people, which judge only by the results, are accustomed to believe that each act of the sovereign corresponds to celestialsigns, that historical coincidences force the hand of fortune.

MONTESQUIEU.

The last word is said, you are a player.

MACHIAVEL.

Yes, but I have an amazing happiness, and I have the so sure hand, the head so fertile that fortune cannot turn.

MONTESQUIEU.

Since you make your portrait, you must still have other defects or other virtues to make pass.

MACHIAVEL.

I ask you for grace for the lust. The passion of the women serves a sovereign much more than you cannot think it. Henri IV owed with his incontinence part of his popularity. The men are thus made, that they like this leaning at those which control them. The dissolution of manners was from time immemorial a fury, a gallant career in which the prince must precede his equal, as it precedes its soldiers in front of the enemy. These ideas are French, and I do not think that they displease too much with the famous author of the Letters Persians. It is not allowed to me to fall into too vulgar considerations, however I then to exempt to me to tell you only the most real result of the galantery of the prince, is to reconcile to him the sympathy of the most beautiful half of its subjects.

MONTESQUIEU.

You turn to the madrigal.

MACHIAVEL.

One can be serious and gallant: you provided the proof of it. I reductions nothing of my proposal. The influence of the women on the public spirit is considerable. In good policy, the prince is condemned to make galantery, while at the same time at the bottom he would not be concerned with it; but the case will be rare.

I then to ensure you that if I am well the rules which I have just traced, one will worry very little about freedom in my kingdom. There will be a sovereign vigorous, dissolu, full with spirit of knighthood, skilful with all the exercises of the body: it will be liked. Austere people will do nothing there; the torrent will be followed; much more, the independent men will be put at the index: one will deviate some. One will believe neither in their character, nor with their satisfying. They will pass for the dissatisfied ones which want to be made buy. If that and there, I did not encourage the talent, one would push back it ofall shares, one would walk on the consciences as on the paving stone. But at the bottom, I will be a moral prince; I will not allow that one goes beyond some limit. I will respect public decency, everywhere where I will see that she wants to be respected. The stains will not reach me, because I will discharge on others from the odious parts of the administration. What one will be able to say of worse, it is that I am a good badly surrounded prince, that I want the good, that I want it ardently, that I will always do it, when it is indicated to me.

If you knew how much it is easy to control when one has the absolute capacity. There, not of contradiction, not of resistance; one can follow to leisure his intentions, one has time to repair his faults. One can without opposition make the happiness of his people, because it is there what always worries me. I then to affirm you that one will not be bored in my kingdom; the spirits will be unceasingly occupied there by thousand various objects. I will give to the people the spectacle my crews and pumps of my court, one will prepare great ceremonies, I will trace gardens, I will offer hospitality to kings, I will make come from the embassies of the most moved back countries. Sometimes they will be noises of war, sometimes diplomatic complications on which one will glosera during whole months; I will go well far, I will give satisfaction even to the monomanie freedom. The wars which will be done under my reign will be undertaken in the name of the freedom of the people and the independence of the nations, and while on my passage the people acclaim me, I will secretly say to the ear absolute kings: Do not fear anything, I am yours, I carry as you a crown and I hold to preserve it: I embrace European freedom, but is to choke it.

Perhaps only one thing could, a moment, to compromise my fortune; it would be the day when one will recognize on all sides that my policy is not frank, that all my acts are marked with the corner of calculation.

MONTESQUIEU.

Which will be thus the blind men who will not see that?

MACHIAVEL.

My entire people, except some coteries about which I will worry little. I formed besides around me a school of politicians of a very great relative force. You could not believe in which point the Machiavellism is contagious, and how much its precepts are easy to follow. In all branches of government it there will have men of nothing, or very-little of consequence, which will be true Machiavels with the small foot which will ruseront, which will dissimulate, which will lie with an imperturbable coolness; the truth could not be done day nowhere.

MONTESQUIEU. If you did nothing but scoff from one end to another of this maintenance, as I believe it, Machiavel, I look at this irony like your more splendid work.

MACHIAVEL.

An irony! You are mistaken well if you think it. You do not understand that I spoke without veil, and that it is the terrible violence of the truth which gives to my words the color that you believe to see!

MONTESQUIEU.

You completed.

MACHIAVEL.

Not yet.

MONTESQUIEU.

Thus complete.

TWENTY-FIFTH DIALOGUE.

MACHIAVEL.

I will prevail ten years under these conditions, without changing anything with my legislation; final success is only at this price. Nothing, absolutely nothing, must vary me during this interval; the lid of the boiler must be of iron and lead; it is during this time that the phenomenon of destruction of the factious spirit is worked out. Perhaps you believe that one is unhappy, that one complains. Ah! I would be inexcusable if it were thus; but when the springs are most violently tightened, when I weigh the most terrible weight on the chest of my people, here what one will say: We have only what we deserve, suffer.

MONTESQUIEU.

You are quite blind if you take that for an apology for your reign; if you do not understand that the expression of these words is a violent regret of the past. It is there a stoical word which announces the day of the punishment to you.

MACHIAVEL.

You disturb me. The hour had just slackened the springs, I will return freedoms.

MONTESQUIEU.

Better thousand times the excess of your oppression is worth; your people will answer you: keep what you took.

MACHIAVEL.

Ah! well there that I recognize the hatred relentless of the parties. Not to grant anything to its political adversaries, anything, not even benefits.

MONTESQUIEU.

Not, Machiavel, nothing with you, nothing! the immol.e victim does not receive benefits of its torturer.

MACHIAVEL.

Ah! that I would penetrate easily in this respect the secret thought of my enemies. They are flattered, they hope that the force of expansion that I compress will launch early or late in space. The foolish ones! They will not know me although at the end. In policy which is necessary to prevent any danger with greatest possible compression? an unperceivable opening. One will have it.

I will not make freedoms considerable, undoubtedly; eh well, however see at which point the absolutism will have already penetrated in manners. I then to guarantee that with the first noise of these freedoms, it will rise around me rumours of terror. My ministers, my advisers will exclaim that I give up the rudder, that all is lost. Me will be entreated, in the name of the hello of the State, in the name of the country, of nothing to make; the people will say: of what does think it? its genius drops; the indifferent ones will say: here it is with end; the heinous ones will say: It died.

MONTESQUIEU.

And they will have all reason, because a modern publicity agent [22] said with a great truth: "Does one Want to charm with the men their rights? one should not anything make with half. What one leaves them, is used to them to reconquer what one removes to them. The hand which remains free releases the other of its irons." MACHIAVEL.

It is tr.s-bien thought; it is very-truth; I know that I expose myself much. You see well that one is unjust towards me, that I like more freedom than it is said. You asked me a few moments ago if I had abnegation, if I could sacrifice me for my people, to go down from the throne to the need: you now have my answer, I from of then to go down by martyrdom.

MONTESQUIEU.

You are well tenderized. Which freedoms go?

MACHIAVEL.

I allow my legislative room to testify myself each year, at the moment of, the expression New Year's Day of his wishes in an address.

MONTESQUIEU.

But since the immense majority of the room is devoted to you, that can you collect if not of the thanks and testimonys of admiration and love?

MACHIAVEL.

Eh well, yes. Aren't these testimonys natural?

MONTESQUIEU.

Are this all freedoms?

MACHIAVEL.

But this first concession is considerable, though you say some. I will however not leave it there. It is made today in Europe a certain movement of spirit against centralization, not at the masses, but in the enlightened classes. I will decentralize, i.e. I will give to my governors of province the right to solve much small local questions subjected before to the approval of my ministers.

MONTESQUIEU.

You do nothing but make tyranny more unbearable if the municipal element does not have nothing to do with this reform.

MACHIAVEL.

Here is the fatal precipitation of those which claim reforms: it is necessary to go to careful steps in the way of freedom. I do not leave it however there: I give commercial freedoms.

MONTESQUIEU.

You already spoke about it.

MACHIAVEL.

It is that the industrial point always touches me: I do not want that one says that my legislation goes, by an excess of distrust towards the people, until preventing it from providing itself for his subsistence. For this reason I make present at the rooms laws which have the aim of derogating a little from the prohibitoryprovisions of association. Remainder, the tolerance of my government made this measurement perfectly useless, and like, in the final analysis, one should be disarmed, nothing will not be changed with the law, if it is not the formula of the drafting. One has today, in the rooms, of the deputies who lend themselves tr.s-bien to these innocent stratagems.

MONTESQUIEU.

Is this all?

MACHIAVEL.

Yes, because it is much, too perhaps; but I believe capacity to reassure me: my army is enthusiastic, my faithful magistrature, and my penal legislation functions with the regularity and the precision of these mechanisms the Almightyes and terrible that modern science with invented.

MONTESQUIEU.

Thus, you do not touch with the laws of the press?

MACHIAVEL.

You would not like it.

MONTESQUIEU.

Ni with the municipal legislation?

MACHIAVEL.

Is this possible?

MONTESQUIEU.

Nor with your system of protectorate of the vote?

MACHIAVEL.

Not.

MONTESQUIEU.

Ni with the organization of the Senate, neither with that of the legislative Body, neither with your interior system, neither with your external system, neither with your economic mode, nor with your financial mode?

MACHIAVEL.

I touch only so that I said to you. Strictly speaking, I leave the period of terror, I enter the way of the tolerance; I it thenwithout dangers; I could even make freedoms real, because it would be necessary well to be stripped of political spirit to recognize only at the imaginary hour which I suppose, my legislation bore all its fruits. I fulfilled the goal that I had announced to you; the character of the nation is changed; light faculties which I returned were for me the probe with which I measured the depth of the result. All is made, all is consumed, it does not have there more possible resistance. There is no more shelf, it is not more nothing! And however I will not return anything. You said it, it is there that is the practical truth.

MONTESQUIEU.

, Machiavel hasten you to finish. Can my shade never meet you, and that God erases of my memory to the last trace of what I have just heard!

MACHIAVEL.

Take guard, Montesquieu; before the minute which starts do not fall into eternity you will seek my steps with anguish and the memory of this maintenance will afflict your heart eternally.

MONTESQUIEU.

Speak!

MACHIAVEL.

Thus let us return. I did all that you know; by these concessions with the liberal spirit of my time, I disarmed the hatred of the parties.

MONTESQUIEU.

Ah! you will thus not drop this mask from hypocrisy of which you covered with the fixed prices that no human language described. You thus want that I left the eternal night to fade you! Ah! Machiavel! yourself had not taught to degrade at this point humanity! You did not conspire against the conscience, you had not conceived the thought to make human heart a mud in which the divine creator himself does not recognize anything any more.

MACHIAVEL.

It is true, I am exceeded.

MONTESQUIEU.

Flee! do not prolong a moment more this maintenance.

MACHIAVEL.

Before the shades which advance in tumult over there reached thisblack ravine which separates them from us, I will have finished; before they did not reach it you do not re-examine me any more and you will call me in vain.

MONTESQUIEU.

Thus complete, it will be the atonement of the temerity which I made by accepting this challenge sacril.ge!

MACHIAVEL.

Ah! freedom! here thus with which force you hold in some hearts when the people mistake you or comforts itself of you by rattles. Let tell you to me on this subject a quite short apologue:

Dion tells that the Roman people were made indignant against Auguste because of certain too hard laws which it had made, but that, as soon as that it had, makes return the Pilade actor, that the factious ones had driven out city, dissatisfaction ceased.

Here is my apologue. Maintaining here the conclusion of the author, because it is an author whom I quote:

"Similar people smelled tyranny more highly when a wandering entertainer was driven out that when one removed all his laws [23] to him."

Do you know which wrote that?

MONTESQUIEU.

Little imports me!

MACHIAVEL.

You thus recognize, it is yourself. I see only low hearts around me, that y then I to make? The wandering entertainers will not miss under my reign and it will be necessary that they act well badly so that I take the party to drive out them.

MONTESQUIEU.

I do not know if you reported my words exactly; but a quotation which I then to guarantee to you here: it will eternally avenge the people which you calumniate:

"Manners of the prince contribute as much to freedom as the laws. He can, like it, to make men of the animals, and animals of the men; if he likes the free hearts, he will have subjects, if he likes the low hearts, he will have slaves [24]."

Here is my answer, and if I had to today add something to this quotation, I would say:

"When public honesty is banished centre of the courses, when the corruption without decency, it is spread out there however does not penetrate never but in the heart of those which approach a bad prince; love of the continuous virtue to living in the centre of the people, and the power of this principle is so large that the bad prince has to only disappear so that, by the force even of the things, honesty returns in practice from the government at the same time as freedom." MACHIAVEL.

That is tr.s-bien written, in a very-simple form. There is only one misfortune so that you have just said, it is that, in the spirit as in the heart of my people, I personify the virtue, well better, I personify freedom, hear you, as I personify the revolution, progress, the modern spirit, all that there is the best finally in the content of contemporary civilization. I do not say that me am respected, I do not say that it is liked me, I say that me am venerated, I say that the people adore me; that, if I wanted it, I would be made raise furnace bridges, because, explain that, I have the fatal gifts which act on the masses. In your country one guillotinait Louis XVI who wanted only the good of the people, which wanted it with all the faith, all the heat of a sincerely honest heart, and, a few years before, one had raised furnace bridges with Louis XIV who worried less about the people than of the last of his mistresses; who, with the least blow of head, had made to mitrailler the rabble while playing dice with Lauzun. But I am, me, much more than Louis XIV, with the popular vote which is used to me as a basis; I am Washington, I am Henri IV, I am holy Louis, Charles-the-Wise, I take your best kings, to make you honor. I am a king of Egypt and of Asia at the same time, I am a Pharaon, I am Cyrus, I am Alexandre, I am Sardanapale; the heart of the people opens out when I pass; it runs with intoxication on my steps; I am an object of idolatry; the father shows me finger with his son, the mother calls upon my name in his prayers, the girl manhole me while sighing and thinks whom if my glance fell on it, by chance, it could perhaps put back a moment on my layer. When the unhappy one is oppressed, he says: If the king knew it; when one wants to be avenged, that a help is hoped for, one says: The king will know it. Me am never approached, of the remainder, that one does not find me the hands full of gold. Those which surround me admittedly are hard, violent one, they deserve sometimes the stick, but it is necessary that it is thus; because their hateful character, m.prisable, their low cupidity, their overflows, their ashamed wastings, their avarice filth make contrast with the softness of my character, my simple paces, my inexhaustible generosity. Me am called upon, say to you I, like a god; in hail, in the food shortage, the fires, I run, the population throws myself to my feet, it would carry me with the sky in his arms, if God gave him wings.

MONTESQUIEU.

What would not prevent you to crush it with grapeshot with theleast sign of resistance.

MACHIAVEL.

It is true, but the love does not exist without fear.

MONTESQUIEU.

This dreadful dream is it finished?

MACHIAVEL.

A dream! Ah! Montesquieu! you will cry a long time: tear the Spirit of the laws, ask God to give you the lapse of memory for your part in the sky; because to come here the terrible truth of which you have already the presentiment; there is no dream in what I have just said to you.

MONTESQUIEU.

What you will learn to me!

MACHIAVEL.

What I have just described you, this whole of monstrous things in front of which the spirit moves back terrified, this work which the hell even could only achieve, all that is done, all that exists, all that thrives with the face of the sun, hour that it is, on a point of this sphere which we left.

MONTESQUIEU.

Where?

MACHIAVEL.

Not, it would be you to inflict one second dead.

MONTESQUIEU.

Ah! speak, in the name of the sky!

MACHIAVEL.

Eh well! à

MONTESQUIEU.

What? à

MACHIAVEL.

The hour passed! You do not see that the swirl carries me!

MONTESQUIEU.

Machiavel!!

MACHIAVEL.

See these shades which pass not far from you by covering the eyes; do you recognize them? in fact glories made the desire of the whole world. At the hour that it is, they redemandent with God their fatherland! à

MONTESQUIEU.

God eternal, whom you allowed! à

FIN.

Footnotes:

[1] Esp. of the laws, p. 24 and 25, chap. IX, delivers III. [2] Esp. of the laws, p. 129, liv. XI, CH. VI. [3] Machiavel refers obviously here to Joseph de Maistre, whose name is found besides further. (Note of the Editor.) [4] Esp. of the laws, p. 543, 544, liv. XXXI, CH. IV. [5] Treaty of the Prince, p. 114, CH. XVII. [6] Esp. of the laws, p. 252 and S., liv. XIX, CH. V. [7] Treaty of the Prince, p. 47, CH. VII. [8] Esp. of the laws, p. 123, delivers XI, chap. III. [9] Esp. of the laws, p. 12 and S., liv. II, and S., CH. II, and S. [10] Esp. of the laws, p. 371, liv. XXIV, CH. I and suiv. [11] Esp. of the laws, p. 393, liv. XXV, CH. XII. [12] Esp. of the laws, p. 68, delivers VI, chap. V. [13] Esp. of the laws, p. 80. chap. X, liv. XIII. [14] Treaty of the Prince, p. 106, CH. XVI. [15] Esp. of the laws, liv. X, CH. XV, p. 127. [16] This sentence is in the foreword of the Spirit of the laws, p. 1. (Note of the Editor.) [17] Esp. of the laws, liv. XXV, chap. II, p 386. [18] Treaty of the Prince, chap. IX, p. 63. [19] One cannot be dissimulated that here Machiavel is not in contradiction with itself, because he says formally, CH. IV, p. 26, "that the Prince who returns another powerful from there works with his own ruin." (Note of the editor.) [20] Treaty of the Prince, chap. XIV, p. 98. [21] Treaty of the Prince, CH. III, p. 17. [22] Benjamin Constant. (Note of the editor.) [23] Esp. of the laws, liv. XIX, chap. II, p. 253. [24] P. 173, chap. XXVII, liv. XII.

ANALYTICAL TABLE OF THE MATTERS.

1st PART. - FIRST DIALOGUE.

Meet of Machiavel and Montesquieu to the hells.

Machiavel speaks in praise of the posthumous life. It complains about reprobation that the posterity attached to its name, and justifies itself.

Its only crime was to say the truth to the people as with the kings; the Machiavellism is former to Machiavel.

Its philosophical and moral system; theory of the force. - Negation of morals and the right in policy.

The great men do it many companies by violating all the laws. The good leaves the evil.

Causes of the preference given to the absolute monarchy. - Incapacity of the democracy. - Despotism favorable to the development of great civilizations.

SECOND DIALOGUE.

Response of Montesquieu. them doctrines of Machiavel do not have basic philosophical. forces it and the easy way are not principles.

The arbitrary capacities are obliged to be based on the right.The reason of State is only the particular interest of the Prince or his favourites.

The right and morals are the bases of the policy. Inconsistency of the contrary system. If the Prince frees himself from the rules of morals, the subjects will do as much of it.

The great men who violate the laws under pretext of save the State make more evil than of good. Anarchy is often much less disastrous than the despotism.

Incompatibility of the despotism with the current state of the institutions among principal people of Europe. - Machiavel invites Montesquieu to justify this proposal.

THIRD DIALOGUE.

Development of the ideas of Montesquieu. it confusion of the capacities is the cause first despotism and anarchy.

Influence political practices under the empire of which the Treaty of the Prince was written. Social advance in knowledge in Europe.

Vast guarantee scheme of which the nations were surrounded. Treaties, constitutions, laws civil.

Separation of the three legislative powers, executive and legal. It is the generating principle of political freedom, the principal obstacle with tyranny.

That the representative mode is the form of government best appropriate to modern times. Conciliation of the order and freedom.

Justice, bases essential government. The Monarch who would practise today the maxims of the Treaty of the Prince would be put at the round of applause of Europe.

Machiavel supports that its maxims did not cease prevailing in the policy of the princes. it offers to prove it.

FOURTH DIALOGUE.

Machiavel makes the critic of the constitutional mode. The capacities will remain motionless or leave their orbit violently.

Mass of the people indifferent to public freedoms from which the real pleasure escapes to him.

Mode representative irreconcilable with the principle of popular sovereignty and the balance of power.

Revolutions. That popular sovereignty led to anarchy and anarchywith the despotism.

Moral and social state of the modern people incompatible with freedom.

Safety is in centralization.

Cesarism of the Lower Empire. India and China.

FIFTH DIALOGUE.

The fate of the despotism is an idea that Montesquieu continues to fight.

Machiavel took for universal laws of the facts which are only accidents.

Progressive development of the liberal institutions from the feudal system to the representative mode.

The institutions corrupt themselves only with the loss of freedom. It thus should be maintained carefully in the economy of the capacities.

Montesquieu does not admit without reserve the principle of popular sovereignty. How it hears this principle. Divine right, human right.

SIXTH DIALOGUE.

Continuation of the same subject. - Antiquity of the elective principle. It is the paramount base of sovereignty.

Extreme consequences of the sovereignty of the people. them revolutions will not be more frequent under the empire of this principle.

Considerable role of industry in modern civilization. Industry is as irreconcilable with the revolutions as with the despotism.

The despotism so much left manners in the most advanced companies Europe, that Montesquieu defies Machiavel to find the means of bringing back it there.

Machiavel accepts the challenge, and the dialogue begins on this data.

SEVENTH DIALOGUE.

Machiavel generalizes initially the system which it proposes to employ.

Its doctrines are of all times; in the century even, it has grandsons who know the price of his lessons. It is not absolutely necessary to put the despotism harmonizes some with modern manners. - Principal rules which it deduces to adopt the movement in the contemporary companies.

Domestic policy, foreign policy.

New rules borrowed from the industrial mode.

How one can make use of the press, the platform and subtleties of the right.

With which it is necessary to give the capacity.

That by these various means one changes the character of the most untameable nation and one makes it as flexible to tyranny as small people of Asia.

Montesquieu urges Machiavel to be left the general information; it puts it in the presence of a State based on representative institutions and asks him how it will be able to turn over from there to the absolute capacity.

2nd PART. - EIGHTH political DIALOGUE. it of Machiavel in action

One rightly, by a coup d'etat, about things made up.

One is pressed on the people and during the dictatorship one alters all the legislation.

Need for printing terror, the shortly after a coup d'etat. Pact of blood with the army. That the usurper must strike all the currency with his effigy.

He will make a new constitution and will not fear to give him for base the great principles of the modern right.

How it will begin there not to apply these principles and to draw aside them successively.

NINTH DIALOGUE. it Constitution

Continuation of the same subject. One makes ratify by the people the coup d'etat.

One establishes the vote for all; it leaves the absolutism there.

The constitution must be the work of only one man; subjected by the vote without discussion, presented in block, accepted in block.

To change the political complexing of the State, it is enough to change the provision of the bodies: Senate, legislative Body, Council of State, etc

Legislative Body. Suppression of the ministerial responsibility and the parliamentary initiative. The proposal of the laws belongs only to the Prince.

One guarantees oneself against the sovereignty of the people by the right of call to the people and the right to declare the state of si.ge.

Suppression of the right of amendment. Restriction of the number of the deputies. - Wage-earning of the deputies. Shortening of the sessions. - Discr.tionnaire Capacity of convocation, extension and dissolution.

TENTH DIALOGUE. it Constitution. (Continuation.)

Senate and of its organization. The Senate should be only one show of body politic intended to cover the action of the Prince and to transmit the absolute and discr.tionnaire capacity to him on all the laws.

Council of State. It must play in another sphere the same part as the Senate. It transmits to the Prince the lawful and legal capacity.

The Constitution is made. Recapitulation in the various ways whose Prince makes the law in this system. It does it in seven manners.

At once after the Constitution, the Prince must issue a series of laws which will draw aside, per way of exception, the principles of public law recognized in block in the constitution.

ELEVENTH DIALOGUE. - Laws

Press. Spirit of the laws of Machiavel. Its definition of freedom is borrowed from Montesquieu.

Machiavel deals initially with the legislation of the Press in its kingdom. It will extend to the newspapers as with the books.

Authorization of the Government to found a newspaper and for all changes in the personnel of the drafting.

Tax measurements to stop the newspaper industry. Abolition of the jury as regards Press. - Penalties by administrative and legal way. System of the warnings. Prohibition of the legislative reports and the lawsuits of Press.

Repression of the false news, - cords of belt against the foreign newspapers. Defense to import writings not - authorized. - Laws against the nationals which will write abroad against the government. - Laws of the same kind imposed on small the State-borders against their own nationals. them corresponding foreigners must be with the pay of the government. Means of refr.ner books. - Granted patents by the government with the printers, editors and booksellers. - Optional Withdrawals of these patents. - Penal Responsibility for the printers. It obliges the latter to make themselves the police force of the books and to refer about it to the agents of the administration.

TWELFTH DIALOGUES. - Of the Press (continuation)

How the government of Machiavel will destroy the Press by being made journalist.

The sheets devoted to the government will be twice more numerous than the independent sheets. Official Journals, semi-official, semi-official, semi-semi-official.

Liberal, democratic, revolutionary newspapers held with the pay of the government without the knowledge of the public. Mode of organization and direction.

Handling of the opinion. Tactic, man.ges, balloons of tests.

Newspapers of province. Importance of their role.

Administrative censure on the newspapers. - Official statements. - Prohibition to reproduce certain private news.

The speeches, the reports/ratios and the reports official are an appendix of the governmental Press. - Processes of language, artifices and style necessary to seize the public opinion.

Perpetual praise of the government. - Reproduction of alleged articles of foreign newspapers which pay homage to the policy of the government. - Critical of the old governments. - Tolerance in fact of religious discussions and light literature.

THIRTEENTH DIALOGUE. - Plots

Hope victims to be made to ensure peace.

Secret societies. Their danger. - Deportation and proscription in mass of those which will have formed part of it.

Optional deportation of those which will remain on the territory.

Criminal laws against those which will be affiliated in the future.

Legal existence data at certain secret societies whose government will name the chiefs, in order to any knowledge and all to direct.

Laws against the right of meeting and association.

Modification of the legal organization. Means of acting on themagistrature without repealing the irremovability of the judges expressly.

FOURTEENTH DIALOGUES. - Institutions before existing

Resources that Machiavel borrows to them.

Constitutional guarantee. That it is a vastness absolute, but necessary, granted to the government officials.

Public ministry. Party which one can draw from this institution.

Supreme court of appeal; danger what would present this jurisdiction if it were too independent.

Resources which the art of jurisprudence in the application of the laws presents which touch with the exercise of the political rights.

How one compensates for a text of law by a stop. Examples.

Means of preventing as much as possible, in certain delicate cases, the recourse of the citizens to the courts. - Semi-official Declarations of the administration which the law applies to such or such case or in such and such direction. Result of these declarations.

FIFTEENTH DIALOGUE. - Vote

Difficulties of avoiding in the application of the vote for all.

It is necessary to remove with the election the appointment of the chiefs of body in all the boards of directors which result from the vote.

That the vote for all would not know, without the greatest danger, being given up with itself for the election of the deputies.

It is necessary to bind the candidates by a preliminary oath. it government must pose to its candidates opposite them voters, and make contribute to their nomination all the agents it has.

The voters should not have the ability to meet to concert their vote. One must avoid making them vote in the centers of agglomeration.

Removal of the list system: Dismemberment of the electoral districts where the opposition is felt. - How or can gain the vote without buying it directly.

Opposition in the Rooms. Parliamentary strategy and art to remove the vote.

SIXTEENTH DIALOGUE. - Certain corporations

Danger what presents the collective forces in general.

National guards. Need for dissolving them. Optional organization and disorganization.

University. That it must be entirely under the dependence of the State, so that the government can direct the spirit of youth. - Removal of the pulpits of constitutional law. - That teaching and the apology for the contemporary history would be very-useful to print the love and the veneration of the Prince in the future generations. - Mobilization of the governmental influence by means of free courses facts by the professors of university.

Bar. Desirable reforms. The lawyers must follow their occupation under the control of the government and be named by him.

Clergy. Possibility for a Prince of cumulating spiritual sovereignty with political sovereignty. Danger that the independence of priesthood makes run to the State.

Of the policy to be held with sovereign pontiff. Perpetual threat of an very-effective schism to contain it.

That the best means would be to be able to hold garrison in Rome, unless one does not decide to destroy the temporal power.

SEVENTEENTH DIALOGUES. - Of the police force

Vast development which it is necessary to give at this institution.

Ministry for the police force. Renaming if the name displeases. - Internal Order, external police force. - Corresponding Services in all the ministries. - Services of international police force.

Role which one can make play Prince blood.

Re-establishment of the black cabinet necessary.

False conspiracies. Their utility. Means of exciting popularity in favour it Prince and of obtaining exceptional laws of State.

Invisible squads which must surround the Prince when it leaves. Improvements of modern civilization in this respect.

Diffusion of the police force in all the rows of the company.

That it is in connection with using of a certain tolerance when one has between the hands all the power of the armed force and the police force.

As what the right to rule on the personal freedom must belong toa single magistrate and not to a council.

Assimilation of the political offences to the common law crimes. Salutary effect.

Lists of the criminal jury composed by the government officials. Jurisdiction as regards simple political offence.

3rd PART. - EIGHTEENTH DIALOGUE. Finances and of their spirit

Objections of Montesquieu. The despotism can be combined only with the system of the conquests and the military government.

Obstacles in the economic mode. The absolutism shakes the right of ownership.

Obstacles in the financial mode. The arbitrary one in policy implies the arbitrary one in finances. Vote tax, fundamental principle.

Response of Machiavel. It is based on the proletariat which is satisfied in the financial combinations, and its deputies are paid.

Montesquieu answers that the financial mechanism of the modern States resists of itself the requirements of the absolute capacity. Budgets. Their mode of clothes industry.

NINETEENTH DIALOGUES. Budgetary system (continuation)

Guarantees what presents this system according to Montesquieu. Balance necessary of the receipts and the expenditure. Vote distinct from the budget of the receipts and the budget of the expenditure. Prohibition to open additional and extraordinary appropriations. Vote budget by chapter. Court of Auditors.

Response of Machiavel. Finances are of all the parts of the policy that which lends itself best to the doctrines Machiavellism.

It will not touch at the Court of Auditors, which it looks like an ingenuous institution. It is delighted by the regularity of the perception of the public monies and the wonders of accountancy.

It repeals the laws which guarantee the balance of the budgets, the control and the limitation of the expenditure.

TWENTIETH DIALOGUE. Continuation of the same subject

That the budgets are only elastic executives which must extend at will. The legislative vote is at the bottom only one pure and simple homologation.

Art to present the budget, to group the figures. Importance of the distinction enters the ordinary budget and the extraordinary budget. Artifices to mask the expenditure and the deficit. That the financial formalism must be impenetrable.

Loans. Montesquieu explains why damping is an indirect obstacle with the expenditure. Machiavel will not deaden; reasons that it gives some.

That the administration of finances is mainly a business of press. Party which one can draw from the reports and the official reports/ratios.

Sentences, formulas and proceeded of language, promises, hopes which one must use either to give confidence to the taxpayers, or to prepare in advance a deficit, or to attenuate it when it is produced.

That sometimes it is necessary to acknowledge boldly that one engaged too much and to announce severe resolutions of economy. Party which one draws from these declarations.

TWENTY AND UNI.ME DIALOGUE. - Loans (continuation)

Machiavel defends the loans. New processes of loan by the States. Public subscriptions.

Other means of getting funds. Treasury bills. Loans by the public banks, the provinces and the cities. Mobilization in revenues of the goods of the communes and the publicly-owned establishments. Sale of the national fields.

Institutions of credit and precaution. Are a means of having all public fortune and of binding the fate of the citizens to the maintenance of the established capacity.

How one pays. Increase in the taxes. Conversion. Consolidation. Wars.

How the public credit is supported. Great credit institutions whose open mission is to lend to the industry, of which the hidden goal is to support the course of the public funds.

LEFT IVe. - VINGT-DEUXI.ME DIALOGUES. - Sizes of the reign

The acts of Machiavel will be in connection with the extent of the resources it has. it will justify the theory that the good leaves the evil.

Wars in the four parts of the world. It will follow the traces of the largest conquerors.

With the insides, constructions gigantic. Rise given to the spirit of speculation and company. Freedom of trade. Improvementof the fate of the working classes.

Reflexions of Montesquieu on all these things.

VINGT-TROISI.ME DIALOGUES. - Various other means that Machiavel will employ to consolidate its empire and to perpetuate its dynasty

Establishment of a Praetorian guard lends to melt on the staggering parts of the empire.

Return on constructions and their political utility. Realization of the idea of the organization of work. - Jacquerie prepared in the event of inversion of the capacity.

Strategic ways, working bastilles, cities in the forecast of the insurrections. People building against itself of the fortresses.

Small means. - Trophies, emblems, images and statues which recall of all shares the size of the Prince.

The Royal name given at all the institutions and all the loads.

Public streets, places and crossroads must bear the historical names of the reign.

Bureaucracy. - That employment should be multiplied.

Decorations and of their use. Means of being made innumerable partisans with few expenses.

Creation of titles and restoration of the great names since Charlemagne.

Utility of the ceremonial and the label. Pumps and festivals. - Of the excitation to the luxury and the sensual pleasures like diversion with the political concerns.

Moral means. Impoverishment of the characters. Moral misery and of its utility.

Like what besides none of these means harms the consideration of the Prince and the dignity of his reign.

VINGT-QUATRI.ME DIALOGUES. - Characteristics of the aspect of the Prince such as Machiavel conceives it

Impenetrability of its intentions. Prestige which it gives to the Prince. - Word on Borgia and Alexandre VI.

Means of preventing the coalition of the foreign powers misled in turn. Reconstitution of a deposed State which gives three hundred and thousand men moreover against armed Europe.

Councils and use which the Prince must make.

That certain defects are virtues in the Prince. Duplicity. How much it is necessary. All consists in creating in all things of appearances.

Words which will mean the opposite of what they will appear to indicate.

Language which the Prince must speak in a State with democratic base.

That the Prince must propose for model a great man of last times and write his life.

As what it is necessary that the Prince is vindicatory. With which facility the victims forget: Word of Tacit.

That the rewards must immediately follow the rendered service.

Utility of the superstition. It accustoms the people to count on star of the Prince. Machiavel is happiest of the players and its chance can never turn.

Need for the galantery. It attaches the most beautiful half of the subjects.

How much it is easy to control with the absolute capacity. Joys of all kinds that Machiavel will give to its people. - Wars in the name of European independence. He will embrace the freedom of Europe, but to choke it.

School of politicians trained by the care of the Prince. The State will be filled with Machiavels to the small foot.

TWENTY-FIFTH AND LAST DIALOGUE. it last word

Twelve years of reign under these conditions. The work of Machiavel is consumed. The public spirit is destroyed. The character of the nation is changed.

Restitution of certain freedoms. Nothing is changed with the system. The concessions are only appearances. One only left the period of terror.

Mark inflicted by Montesquieu. It wants nothing any more to hear.

Anecdote of Dion on Auguste. Avenger quotation of Montesquieu.

Apology for crowned Machiavel. It is larger than Louis XIV, than Henri IV and than Washington. The people adore it.

Milked Montesquieu of visions and dreams the system of government which has just erected scaffolding Machiavel. Machiavel answers that all that it has just said exists identically on a point of the sphere.

Montesquieu presses Machiavel to name him the kingdom where the things occur thus.

Machiavel will speak; a swirl of hearts carries it.

END OF THE TABLE.

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