Page:The Book of the Courtier.djvu/432

 THE FOURTH BOOK OF THE COURTIER 34-— " I should say then, that the prince ought to employ these and many other suitable precautions, so that there may not arise in his subjects' mind a desire for new things and for a change of gov- ernment; which they most often bring to pass either for gain or else for honour which they hope for, or because of loss or else of shame which they fear. And this unrest is engendered in their minds sometimes by hatred and anger driving them to despair, by reason of the wrongs and insults that have been w^rought upon them through the avarice, insolence and cruelty or lust of their superiors; sometimes by the contempt that is aroused in them by the neglect and baseness and unworthiness of their princes. These two errours ought to be avoided by winning the people's love and obedience; as is done by benefiting and rewarding the good, and by prudently and sometimes severely precluding the bad and seditious from becoming powerful, which is much easier to prevent before they have become so than to deprive them of power after they have once acquired it. And I should say that to prevent a subject from running into these errours, there is no better way than to keep him from evil practices, and especially from those that spread little by little ; for they are secret pests that infect cities before it is possible to cure or even to detect them. " By such means I should advise that the prince contrive to keep his subjects in a tranquil state, and to give them the bless- ings of mind and body and fortune; but those of the body and of fortune, in order to be able to exercise those of the mind, which are the more profitable the greater and more superabundant they are; which is not true of those of the body and of fortune. If, then, the subjects be good and worthy and rightly directed towards the goal of happiness, their prince is a very great lord; for that is a true and great dominion, under which the subjects are good and well governed and well commanded." 35-— Then my lord Gaspar said: " I think that he would be a small lord under whom all the subjects were good, for in every place the good are few." My lord Ottaviano replied: " If some Circe were to change all the subjects of the King of France into wild beasts, would he not seem to you a small lord 272