know that
by the new alliance they should practise these arts on other people,
which would be infamy. We are not going to hold other people down; we
are going to encourage them to stand up. If it means a further fight we
have plenty of stimulus still. Our oppression has been doubly bitter
for having been mean. The tyranny of a strong mind makes us rage, but
the tyranny of a mean one is altogether insufferable. The cruelty of a
Cromwell can be forgotten more easily than the cant of a Macaulay. When
we read certain lines we go into a blaze, and that fire will burn till
it has burnt every opposition out. In his essay on Milton, Macaulay
having written much bombast on the English Revolution, introduces this
characteristic sentiment: "One part of the Empire there was, so
unhappily circumstanced, that at that time its misery was necessary to
our happiness and its slavery to our freedom." For insolence this would
be hard to beat. Let it be noted well. It is the philosophy of the
"Predominant Partner." If he had thanked God for having our throats to
cut, and cut them with loud gratitude like Cromwell, a later generation
would be incensed. But this other attitude is the gall in the cup.
Macaulay is, of course, shocked by Machiavelli's "Prince." In his essay
on Machiavelli we read: "It is indeed scarcely possible for any person
not well acquainted with the history and literature of Italy to read
without horror and amazement the celebrated treatise which has brought
so much obloquy on the name of Machiavelli. Such a display of
wickedness, naked, yet not ashamed, such cool, judicious, scientific
atrocity, seemed rather to belong to a fiend than to the most depraved
of men." But, later, in the same essay, is a valuable sidelight. He
writes of Machiavelli as a man "whose only fault was that, having
adopted some of the maxims then generally received, he arranged them
most luminously and expressed them more forcibly than any other writer."
Here we have the truth, of course not so intended, but evident:
Machiavelli's crime is not for the sentiments he entertained but for
writing them down luminously and forcibly--in other words, for giving
the show away.

Think of Macaulay's "horror and amazement," and read this further in the
same essay: "Every man who has seen the world knows that nothing is so
useless as a general maxim. If it be very moral and very true it may
serve for a copy to a charity boy." So the very moral and the very true