disposal before, and when Ithink of what a little straggling,

incidental, undisciplined and uncoordinated minority of inventors,

experimenters, educators, writers and organisers has achieved this

development of human possibilities, achieved it in spite of the

disregard and aimlessness of the huge majority, and the passionate

resistance of the active dull, my imaginationgrows giddy with

dazzling intimations of the human splendours the justly organised

state may yetattain. I glimpse for a bewildering instant the

heights that may be scaled, the splendid enterprises made possible.

But the appeal goes out now in otherforms, in a book that catches

at thousands of readers for the eye of a Prince diffused. It is the

old appeal indeed for the unification of human effort, the ending of

confusions, but instead of the Machiavellian deference to a

flattered lord, a man cries out of his heart to the unseen

fellowship about him. The last written dedication of all those I

burnt last night, was to no single man, but to the socially

constructive passion-in any man…

There is, moreover, a second great difference in kind between my

world and Machiavelli's. We are discovering women. It is as if

they had come across a vast interval since his time, into the very

chamber of the statesman.

2

In Machiavelli's outlook the interest of womanhood was in a region

of life almost infinitely remote from his statecraft. They were the

vehicle of children, but only Imperial Rome and the new world of to-

day have ever had an inkling of the significance that might give

them in thestate. They did their work, hethought, as the ploughed

earth bears its crops. Apart from their function of fertility they

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