_Machiavel_.--This example, I own, may seem to be of some weight against the truth of my system. But at the same time it demonstrates that there was nothing so new in the doctrines I published as to make it reasonable to charge me with the disorders and mischiefs which, since my time, any kingdom may have happened to suffer from the ambition of a subject or the tyranny of a prince. Human nature wants no teaching to render it wicked. In courts more especially there has been, from the first institution of monarchies, a policy practised, not less repugnant than mine to the narrow and vulgar laws of humanity and religion. Why should I be singled out as worse than other statesmen? _Guise_.--There have been, it must be owned, in all ages and all states, many wicked politicians; but thou art the first that ever taught the science of tyranny, reduced it to rules, and instructed his disciples how to acquire and secure it by treachery, perjuries, assassinations, proscriptions, and with a particular caution, not to be stopped in the progress of their crimes by any check of the conscience or feeling of the heart, but to push them as far as they shall judge to be necessary to their greatness and safety. It is this which has given thee a pre-eminence in guilt over all other statesmen. _Machiavel_.--If you had read my book with candour you would have perceived that I did not desire to render men either tyrants or rebels, but only showed, if they were so, what conduct, in such circumstances, it would be rational and expedient for them to observe. _Guise_.--When you were a minister of state in Florence, if any chemist or physician had published a treatise, to instruct his countrymen in the art of poisoning, and how to do it with the most certain destruction to others and security to themselves, would you have allowed him to plead in his justification that he did not desire men to poison their neighbours? But, if they would use such evil means of mending their fortunes, there could surely be no harm in letting them know what were the most effectual poisons, and by what methods they might give them without being discovered. Would you have thought it a sufficient apology for him that he had dropped in his preface, or here and there in his book, a sober exhortation against the committing of murder? Without all doubt, as a magistrate concerned for the safety of the people of Florence, you would have punished the wretch with the utmost severity, and taken great care to destroy every copy of so pernicious a book. Yet your own admired work contains a more baneful and more infernal art. It poisons states and kingdoms, and spreads its malignity, like a general pestilence, over the whole world. _Machiavel_.--You must acknowledge at least that my discourses on Livy are full of wise and virtuous maxims and precepts of government.