f Rimini, the Baglione of Perugia, and the Borgias of Rome.
They were not more immoral than the members of the courts of Louis XIV
and XV and of August of Saxony, but their murders rendered them more
terrible. Human life was held to be of little value, but criminal
egotism often was qualified by greatness of mind (magnanimitas), so that
a bloody deed prompted by avarice and ambition was often condoned.

Egotism and the selfish use of conditions and men for the profit of the
individual were never so universal as in the country of Macchiavelli,
where unfortunately they still are frequently in evidence. Free from the
pedantic opinions of the Germans and the reverence for condition, rank,
and birth which they have inherited from the Middle Ages, the Italians,
on the other hand, always recognized the force of personality--no matter
whether it was that of a bastard or not--but they, nevertheless, were
just as likely to become the slaves of the successful. Macchiavelli
maintains that the Church and the priests were responsible for the moral
ruin of the peninsula--but were not the Church and these priests
themselves products of Italy? He should have said that characteristics
which were inherent in the Germanic races were foreign to the Italians.
Luther could never have appeared among them.

While our opinion of Alexander VI and Caesar is governed by ethical
considerations, this was not the case with Guicciardini, and less still
with Macchiavelli. They examined not the moral but the political man,
not his motives but his acts. The terrible was not terrible when it was
the deed of a strong will, nor was crime disgraceful when it excited
astonishment as a work of art. The terrible way in which Ferdinand of
Naples handled the conspiracy of the nobles of his kingdom made him, in
the eyes of Italy, not horrible but great; and Macchiavelli speaks of
the trick with which Caesar Borgia outwitted his treacherous condottieri
at Sinigaglia as a "masterstroke," while the Bishop Paolo Giovio called
it "the most beautiful piece of deception." In that world of egotism
where there was no tribunal of public opinion, man could preserve
himself only by overpowering power and by outwitting cunning with
craft. While the French regarded, and still regard, "ridiculous" as the
worst of epithets, the Italian dreaded none more than that of
"simpleton."

Macchiavelli, in a well-known passage in his _Discorsi_ (i. 27),
explains his theory with terrible f