On the establishment of governments, moreover, he spends very little thought. This, however, is with Machiavelli the main matter, as he himself says near the opening of the second part of his work: "The chief foundations of all states, new as well as old or composite, are good laws and good arms; and as there cannot be good laws where the state is not well armed, it follows that when they are well armed they have good laws. I shall leave the laws out of the discussion and shall speak of the arms." Had the Greek heard him he would have scoffed at both the argument and the conclusion. The argument is, of course, sophistical, and the conclusion saved only by the fact that Machiavelli had already considered the political weapons with which rulers should operate. The _Politics_ is a handbook for legislators; the _Prince_ a set of instructions for potentates. For the latter the ways and means of _acquiring_ power was, in Machiavelli's judgment, the all-important thing; whereas the legislator's possession of power is taken for granted by Aristotle, and it is assumed throughout his entire treatment that, if the lawgiver knows the constitution, the laws, and the system of education which are best adapted to the economic, social, and political conditions of his state, he can at once introduce them. In a measure, therefore, the _Prince_ and the _Politics_ supplement each other, though Aristotle would have been horrified at the idea. For in his thinking, in anything approximating to an ideal world, each city was free to order its internal affairs as it thought best, and, having this liberty, if it was shown what was best, it must, according to the Socratic psychology, immediately adopt it; whereas--to give the devil his due--Machiavelli was actuated, in formulating his precepts for Prince Lorenzo, by the vision of a united Italy, the realization of which by his pupil was to wash away the crimes committed in subjecting to his will the city-states of the peninsula. The conquest of Italy was, accordingly, the goal of the ideal Prince's endeavor; whereas, though Aristotle in one passage of the _Politics_[56] notes that "if the Greeks were united in a single polity they would be capable of universal empire," he regards such a union as highly undesirable. To him a state that was not a city was a rudimentary and very imperfect state. It ceased to be a state at all when it ceased to be free. Hence a city could have subjects, that is to say, slaves, but not dependencies. And since in his thinking it was natural inferiority alone that justified slavery, and this was found especially among the nations of Asia, and not at all in Greece, no Greek city could rightly enslave the inhabitants of any other Greek city: it could wage war and organize slave raids only against barbarians.