The periodical assemblies of which I have already spoken are designed to prevent or postpone this calamity, above all when they need no formal summoning; for in that case, the prince cannot stop them without openly declaring himself a law-breaker and an enemy of the State.
The opening of these assemblies, whose sole object is the maintenance of the social treaty, should always take the form of putting two propositions that may not be suppressed, which should be voted on separately.
The first is: "Does it please the Sovereign to preserve the present form of government?"The second is: "Does it please the people to leave its administration in the hands of those who are actually in charge of it?"I am here assuming what I think I have shown; that there is in the State no fundamental law that cannot be revoked, not excluding the social compact itself; for if all the citizens assembled of one accord to break the compact, it is impossible to doubt that it would be very legitimately broken.Grotius even thinks that each man can renounce his membership of his own State, and recover his natural liberty and his goods on leaving the country.33 It would be indeed absurd if all the citizens in assembly could not do what each can do by himself.
18.Thus at Venice the College, even in the absence of the Doge, is called "Most Serene Prince."19.The Palatine of Posen, father of the King of Poland, Duke of Lorraine.
20.I prefer liberty with danger to peace with slavery.
21.It is clear that the word optimales meant, among the ancients, not the best, but the most powerful.
22.It is of great importance that the form of the election of magistrates should be regulated by law; for if it is left at the discretion of the prince, it is impossible to avoid falling into hereditary aristocracy, as the Republics of Venice and Berne actually did.The first of these has therefore long been a State dissolved; the second, however, is maintained by the extreme wisdom of the senate, and forms an honourable and highly dangerous exception.
23.Machiavelli was a proper man and a good citizen; but, being attached to the court of the Medici, he could not help veiling his love of liberty in the midst of his country's oppression.
The choice of his detestable hero, Caesar Borgia, clearly enough shows his hidden aim; and the contradiction between the teaching of the Prince and that of the Discourses on Livy and the History of Florence shows that this profound political thinker has so far been studied only by superficial or corrupt readers.The Court of Rome sternly prohibited his book.I can well believe it; for it is that Court it most clearly portrays.
24.Tacitus, Histories , i.16.
"For the best, and also the shortest way of finding out what is good and what is bad is to consider what you would have wished to happen or not to happen, had another than you been Emperor."25.In the Statesman.
26.This does not contradict what I said before (Book II, ch.9) about the disadvantages of great States; for we were then dealing with the authority of the government over the members, while here we are dealing with its force against the subjects.Its scattered members serve it as rallying-points for action against the people at a distance, but it has no rallying-point for direct action on its members themselves.Thus the length of the lever is its weakness in the one case, and its strength in the other.
