H. Wells - THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

was by seizing the imagination of a Prince. Directly these men

turned their thoughtstowards realisation, their attitudesbecame-

what shall I call it?-secretarial. Machiavelli, it is true, had

some little doubtsabout the particular Prince he wanted, whether it

was Caesar Borgia of Giuliano or Lorenzo, but a Prince it had to be.

Before I sawclearly the differences of our own time I searched my

mindfor the modern equivalent of a Prince. At various times I

redrafted a parallel dedication to the Prince of Wales, to the

Emperor William, to Mr. Evesham, to a certain newspaper proprietor

who was once my schoolfellow at City Merchants', to Mr. J. D.

Rockefeller-all of them men in their several ways and circumstances

and possibilities, princely. Yet in every case my pen bent of its

own accord towards irony because-because, although at first I did

not realise it, I myselfam just as free to be a prince. The appeal

was unfair. The old sort of Prince, the old little principality has

vanished from the world. The commonweal is one man's absolute

estate and responsibilityno more. In Machiavelli's time it was

indeed to an extreme degree one man's affair. But the days of the

Prince who planned and directed and was the source and centre of all

power are ended. We are in a conditionof affairs infinitely more

complex, in which every prince and statesman is something of a

servant and every intelligent human beingsomething of a Prince. No

magnificent pensive Lorenzos remain any more in this world for

secretarial hopes.

In a sense it is wonderful how power has vanished, in a sense

wonderful how it has increased. I sit here, an unarmed discredited

man, at a small writing-table in a little defenceless dwelling among

the vines, and no human beingcan stop my pen except by the

deliberate self-immolation of murdering me, nor destroy its fruits

except by theft and crime. No King, no council, can seize and

torture me; no Church, no nation silence me. Such powers of

ruthless and complete suppression have vanished. But that is not

because power has diminished, but because it has increased and

become multitudinous, because it has dispersed itself and

specialised. It is no longer a negative power we have, but

positive; we cannot prevent, but we can do. This age, far beyond

all previous ages, is full of powerful men, men who might, if they

had the will for it, achieve stupendous things.

The things that might be done to-day! The things indeed that are

beingdone! It is the latter that give one so vast a sense of the

former. When I thinkof the progress of physical and mechanical

science, of medicine and sanitation during the last century, when I

measure the increase in general education and average efficiency,

the power now available for human service, the merely physical

increment, and compare it with anything that has ever been at man's

disposalbefore, and when I thinkof 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 imagination growsgiddy with

dazzling intimations of the human splendours the justly organised

statemay yet attain. I glimpse for a bewildering instant the

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

But the appeal goes out now in other forms, 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.

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 the state. They did their work, he thought, as the ploughed

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

gave a humorous twist to life, stimulated worthy men to toil, and

wasted the hours of Princes. He left the thoughtof women outside

with his other dusty things when he went into his study to write,

dismissed them from his mind. But our modern world is burthened

with its sense of the immense, now half articulate, significance of

women. They stand now, as it were, close beside the silver

candlesticks, speaking as Machiavelli writes, until he stays his pen

and turns to discuss his writing with them.

It is this gradual discovery of sex as a thing collectively

portentous that I have to mingle with my statecraft if my picture is

to be truewhich has turned me at length from a treatise to the

telling of my own story. In my life I have paralleled very closely

the slow realisations that are going on in the world about me. I

began life ignoring women, they came to me at first perplexing and

dishonouring; only very slowly and very late in my life and after

misadventure, did I gauge the power and beauty of the love of man

and woman and learnt how it must needs frame a justifiable vision of

the ordered world. Love has brought me to disaster, because my

career had been planned regardless of its possibility and value.

But Machiavelli, it seems to me, when he went into his study, left

not only the earth of life outside but its unsuspected soul.

Like Machiavelli at San Casciano, if I may take this analogy one

step further, I too am an exile. Office and leading are closed to

me. The political career that promised so much for me is shattered

and ended for ever.

I look out from this vine-wreathed veranda under the branches of a

stone pine; I seewide and far across a purple valley whose sides

are terraced and set with houses of pine and ivory, the Gulf of

Liguria gleaming sapphire blue, and cloud-like baseless mountains

hanging in the sky, and I thinkof lank and coaly steamships heaving

on the grey rollers of the English Channel and darkling streets wet

with rain, I recall as if I were back there the busy exit from

Charing Cross, the cross and the money-changers' offices, the

splendid grime of giant London and the crowds going perpetually to

and fro, the lights by night and the urgency and eventfulness of

that great rain-swept heart of the modern world.

It is difficult to thinkwe have left that-for many years if not

for ever. In thoughtI walk once more in Palace Yard and hearthe

clink and clatter of hansoms and the quick quietwhirr of motors; I

go in vivid recent memoriesthrough the stir in the lobbies, I sit

again at eventful dinners in those old dining-rooms like cellars

below the House-dinners that ended with shrill division bells, I

thinkof huge clubs swarming and excited by the bulletins of that