Page:Machiavelli, Romanes Lecture, 2 June 1897.djvu/66

62 and he did not choose to let the world suppose that saint and innocent were the same thing.—History of Henry VII.; Works, vi. 233 (Spedding and Heath).

33 Ferrari, Hist, de la Raison d'Etat, 300.

34 'Frederick the Great of Prussia, in November 1760, published military instructions for the use of his generals, which were based on a wide, practical knowledge of the matter. . . . When he could not procure himself spies among the Austrians, owing to the careful guard which their light troops kept around their camp, the idea occurred to him, and he acted on it with success, of utilising the suspension of arms that was customary after a skirmish between hussars, to make these officers the means of conducting epistolary correspondence with the officers on the other side. "Spies of compulsion," he explained in this way. When you wish to convey false information to an enemy, you take a trustworthy soldier and compel him to pass to the enemy's camp to represent there all that you wish the enemy to believe. You also send by him letters to excite the troops to desertion; and in the event of its being impossible to obtain information about the enemy, Frederick prescribes the following: Choose some rich citizen who has land and a wife and children, and another man, disguised as his servant or coachman, who understands the enemy's language. Force the former to take the latter with him to the enemy's camp to complain of injuries sustained, threatening him that if he fails to bring the man back with him after having stayed long enough for the desired object, his wife and children shall be hanged and his house burnt. "I was myself," he adds, "constrained to have recourse to this method, and it succeeded." '—Maine, International Law, 150-1.

35 More than one historian has pointed out as one of the merits of Louis XI., that it was he who substituted in government intellectual means for material means, craft for force, Italian policy for feudal policy. There was plenty of lying and of fraud, but it was a marked improvement in the tactics of power to put persuasion, address, skilful handling of men, into the place of impatient and reckless resort to naked force. Since the days of Louis XI., so it is argued, we have made a further advance; we have introduced