against the red that I have to tell.

The state-makingdream is a very olddream indeed in the world's

history. It plays too small a part in novels. Plato and Confucius

are but the highest of a great host ofminds that have had a kindred

aspiration, havedreamt of a world of men better ordered,happier,

finer, securer. They imagined citiesgrown more powerful and

peoples made rich and multitudinous by their efforts, theythought

in terms of harbours and shining navies, great roads engineered

marvellously, jungles cleared and deserts conquered, the ending of

muddle and diseases and dirt and misery; the ending of confusions

that waste human possibilities; theythought of these things with

passion anddesire as other menthink of the soft lines and tender

beauty of women. Thousands of men there are to-day almost mastered

by this white passion of statecraft, and in nearly every one who

reads andthinks you could find, I suspect, some sort of answering

response. But in every one it presents itself extraordinarily

entangled and mixed up with other, more intimate things.

It was so with Machiavelli. I picture him at San Casciano as he

lived in retirement upon his property after the fall of the

Republic, perhaps with a twinge of the torture that punished his

conspiracy still lurking in his limbs. Such twinges could not stop

hisdreaming. Then it was "The Prince" was written. All day he

went about his personal affairs,saw homely neighbours, dealt with

his family, gave vent to everyday passions. He would sit in the

shop of Donato del Corno gossiping curiously among vicious company,

or pace thelonely woods of his estate, book in hand, full ofbitter

meditations. In the evening he returned home and went to his study.

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