But the truth of a dream inheres in the dream itself and is measured only in a secondary way by the course of events. _De Monarchia_ has for us at least the value of a pacifist tract, the noble core of which is not obscured by the strangeness of some of the reasoning or by the destruction of Dante's political milieu. Like some other pacifist documents it is the work of an aggressive militant mind. Dante had lived and suffered in a world continuously at war. The contesting powers, great and small, were so complicated that the historian has difficulty in keeping them clear. To the major quarrels between church and state and the strife of the city-republics with one or the other or both were added an internal warfare between economic classes and feuds between castes and families, all hopelessly intricate. In this bloody confusion Dante had played the part not of closet philosopher _au-dessus de la melee_, but of soldier and civil official. And to the last he was temperamentally a fighter, though forced by circumstances to drop the sword for the pen. He was not in the eyes of his contemporaries what he has become for us, the supreme solitary genius exiled by an ungrateful city, but was simply one of a thousand members of a beaten party. He was not a pathetic, unappreciated poet but a pertinacious partisan who happened to be on the losing side. He knew war and misery and defeat. Yet his plea for peace is by no means that of a weary belligerent; it is that of a bellicose champion of certain principles. And so, though those principles do not appeal to us and though the expression of them is laborious, even turgid, _De Monarchia_ is still hot with conviction. The instrument of peace was the one form of government that Dante knew, the empire. Even if his genius had taken the form of vaticination (he was indeed, as it turned out, a poor prophet), he naturally could not in his time have made himself familiar with leagues of nations and Wellsian "world-states." He had to ride on a horse, not in a motor-car. And he rode, as a worldly rider, to a fall. The tragedy of the fall has in it a large element of dramatic irony because he was so splendidly sure of his ideas at exactly the moment when they were least secure. Dante's conception of an ideal empire had nothing in common with what we now call imperialism, which is mere commercial conquest and can be led by Kaiser or democratic prime minister with equally disastrous results. Dante believed in an imperial headship for the good of all humanity. The ruler of the world was to be the servant of the world, not its master and exploiter; a supreme monarch was to be protected by his lonely authority from the temptations that beset a weak man clothed with limited and contentious authority; aloof from strife and cupidity, having all and so being beyond pride and ambition, he could be a disinterested and just administrator.