stand in the way of preserving power, from whatsoever cause it is once threatened. Men are mostly evil, as your great Italian thinker, Nicholas Machiavelli, was bold enough to proclaim, and their guides or politicians are crafty animals who suck advantage from every weakness of humanity. Such being the inevitable state of things politic, our poor monarchs are placed in a hopeless dilemma, whereby they are doomed to failure, and for the following reasons. If they avoid the snare of politics, they grow vicious or oppressive of the populace, so that they lose the general esteem, and the watching hierarchy is swift to annex this alienated favour and to transfer it to its own body by ridding Meleager of an obnoxious semi-divine King. Again, it has happened on not a few occasions that the King has set to combine with the subservient populace against the real ruling caste. I myself have seen these palace courts and halls slippery with the blood of slaves and soldiers who have sought at the royal bidding to overthrow the executive council, and have themselves been overwhelmed and massacred in the attempt. Or else, commonest and most dreaded event of all that we prepare to circumvent, our monarch will seek to found a dynasty. This is a danger we are compelled to nip in the bud by eliminating the erring sovereign rather than by destroying the victim or tool of his designs. But you yourself belong to none of these categories of undesirable rulers--the ambitious, the despotic, the brutal, the licentious, the knavish; and it is for this very distinction that I now have come hither to inform you of certain things.