He was too much of a positive mind not to realise that the difference between past and modern times was due to a spiritual difference. Not knowing what to attack in the mentality of his countrymen, both clever and learned beyond words, he thought that the only great difference between ancient Rome and the Italy of the Cinquecento were the political institutions which of old had been based on a religion that pervaded the whole of civic life, and now were quite a practical affair modified continually by the chance of other countries waging war in Italy. His great blunder, the notion he had that the Roman state-religion of Pagan times would be the one chance of salvation for his own time is to be considered with due allowance for the ignorance of the sixteenth century as to the real import of the notion of progress. Machiavelli pronounced human things to be always in movement, but in spite of this intuition he could not detect the processional character of such movement. As it was, it was sufficient to induce him to reject the notion of the natural state of Man as a constant so dear to Grotius. Yet it could not help him to realise that his own times, with all their wickedness, might be thought superior to Roman times; and Guicciardini, a friend of his, felt himself much wiser than Machiavelli because he had no illusion on the possibility of making a nation out of his countrymen. It was absurd to him, to be always calling on the Romans for example, it was just like wanting a donkey to gallop horsewise! But whatever the wisdom of Guicciardini, who made his God of his own private peace and well-being, a God no less exacting than the State of Machiavelli, and considered the world as his world, thereby enforcing to irrelativism the subjective atomism that was disintegrating Italy, Machiavelli was a wonder child of genius whilst his wise friend was merely a clever gentleman making egotism the special study of his life. Mussolini’s view on the civic regeneration of the Italian politically amorphous classes is very much like Machiavelli’s. Political indifference is also to him a result of the lack of religiousness in the spirit animating Italians in their public life. But four hundred years have passed and he could not if he wished turn to the state religion of Pagan Rome. If the basis of social life has to be religion, the positive religion has to be the one historically belonging to the people.