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 being
done! It is the latter that give one so vast a sense of the former. When
I think of 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 disposal before, and when I think
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 imagination grows giddy
with dazzling intimations of the human splendours the justly organised
state may 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.

2

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