The profoundest students of the actions of States have in all times been aware, not of the fixed antagonism, but of the essential distinction, between the two codes. Every principle of Machiavelli is implicit in Thucydides, and Sulla, whom Montesquieu selects as the supreme type of Roman grandeur, does but follow principles which reappear in the politics of an Innocent III or a Richelieu, a Cromwell or an Oxenstiern.[1] The loss of Sulla's _Commentaries_[2] is irreparable as the loss of the fifth book of the _Annals_ of Tacitus or the burnt _Memoirs_ of Shaftesbury; in the literature of politics it is a disaster without a parallel. What Sulla felt as a first, most living impulse appears in later times as a colder, a critical judgment. It is thus that it presents itself to Machiavelli, not the writer of that _jeu d'esprit_, _Il Principe_, perplexing as _Hamlet_, and as variously interpreted, but the author of the stately periods of the _Istorie_ and the _Discorsi_, the haughtiest of speculators, and in politics the profoundest of modern thinkers. M. Sorel encounters little difficulty in proving that the diplomacy of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is but an exposition of the principles of the _Discorsi_; Frederick the Great, who started his literary activity by the refutation of the _Prince_, began and ended his political career as if his one aim were to illustrate the maxims that in the rashness of inexperience he had condemned; and within living memory, the vindicator of Oliver Cromwell found in the composition of the same Frederick's history the solace and the torment of his last and greatest years. To press this inquiry further would be foreign to the present subject; enough has been said to indicate that from whatever deep unity they may spring, the laws which determine the life of a State, as displayed in History, are not identical with the laws of individual life. The region of Art, however, seems to offer a neutral territory, where it is possible to obtain some perception, or _Ahnung_ as a German would say, of the operation in the life of States of a law which bears directly upon the problem before us. § 2. THE LAW OF TRAGEDY AS APPLIED TO HISTORY In the history of past empires, their rise and decline, in the history of this Empire of Britain from the coming of Cerdic and Cynric to the present momentous crisis, there reveals itself a force, an influence, not without analogy to the influence ascribed by Aristotle to Attic Tragedy. The function of Tragedy he defined as the purification of the soul by Compassion and by Terror--+di eléou kaì phóbou kátharsis+.[3] Critics and commentators still debate the precise meaning of the definition; but my interpretation, or application of it to the present inquiry is this, that by compassion and terror the soul is exalted above compassion and terror, is lifted above the touch of pity or of fear, attaining to a state like that portrayed by Dante--