# CHAPTER 16 — A People Accustomed to Living Under a Prince Maintains Its Freedom With Difficulty If, by Some Accident, It Becomes Free

How difficult it is for a people accustomed to living under a prince to preserve its freedom if, by some accident, it has acquired freedom, as the Romans did once they drove out the Tarquins, is demonstrated by countless examples that can be read in the annals of ancient history. Such difficulty is understandable, because that people is no more than a brutish animal which, while still ferocious and wild by nature, has always been kept imprisoned and enslaved, and then, left by chance in an open field, unaccustomed to feeding itself and not knowing the spots where it might seek refuge, becomes prey to the first person who seeks to put it back into chains. *

The same things happen to a people accustomed to living under the government of others, since not knowing how to reason about either public defence or offence, and not understanding princes or being understood by them, it swiftly returns under a yoke which is, in most instances, heavier than the one that only a short while earlier had been lifted from its neck, and it finds itself in these difficulties even though its substance is not corrupted. * In fact, a people which has become completely corrupted cannot live free even for a brief time, not even a moment, as will be discussed below, and our inquiries, therefore, concern those peoples where corruption has not spread too widely and there remains more of the good than the tainted.

Another difficulty to be added to the one mentioned above is that a state that becomes free creates for itself enemies rather than friends. * All those who took advantage of the tyrannical government and who fed off the wealth of the prince become hostile members; having lost the possibility of privilege, they can no longer live content, and each of them is forced to try to retrieve the tyranny in order to return to his former authority. Nor will such a state, as I have said, acquire friendly members, because free government confers honours and prizes for honest and specific reasons, and beyond them confers no honours or prizes whatsoever, and when a man possesses those honours and advantages he feels he deserves, he does not admit an obligation to those who have rewarded him. Besides this, the common benefit derived from a free government is recognized by no one while it is possessed, that is, to be able freely to enjoy one’s possessions without worry, to feel no fear for the honour of one’s women and children, and to feel no fear for one’s own safety, because no one ever admits owing an obligation to someone who does not harm him.

Yet, as I said above, the state that is free and newly established comes to acquire enemies and not friends. In the desire to remedy these disadvantages and the disorders which the aforementioned difficulties bring along with them, there is no more powerful remedy, nor one more valid, safe, and necessary than to kill the sons of Brutus, who, as history demonstrates, were led to conspire together with other young Romans against their native city * for no other reason than that they were unable to enjoy the extraordinary privileges under the consuls that they had enjoyed under the king, so that it seemed to them that the liberty of the people had become their slavery. Anyone who undertakes governing a multitude of people, either under a free system or under a principality, and does not protect himself from the people who are hostile to the new order, creates a state of short duration. It is true that I judge those princes unfortunate who, having the multitude as their enemy, must have recourse to extraordinary means to protect their state, because the ruler who has the few as his enemy can protect himself easily and without much discord, but the man who has the general population as his enemy can never protect himself, and the more cruelty he employs, the weaker his principality becomes. Thus, the best remedy he has is to try to make the people friendly to him. *

Although this commentary may diverge from what I have written above, since I speak here of a prince and there of a republic, nevertheless, in order not to have to return to this topic later, I wish to discuss it briefly now. If a prince wishes, therefore, to win over a people that has been hostile to him (I am speaking of those princes who have become rulers in their native lands), let me say that he must first examine what the people want, and he will always discover that they want two things: first, to take revenge against those who were the cause of their being enslaved, and second, to regain their liberty. The prince can satisfy the first desire completely but the second only in part. For the first, there is an appropriate example. * When Clearchus, tyrant of Heraclea, was in exile, it happened that a dispute arose between the people and the aristocrats of Heraclea; the aristocrats, realizing they were weaker, turned to support Clearchus, and conspiring with him, they placed him in power against popular opinion in Heraclea and took away the people’s freedom. As a result, when Clearchus found himself caught between the insolence of the aristocrats, whom he could neither satisfy nor punish in any way, and the anger of the people, who could not bear having lost their freedom, he decided to free himself from the annoyance of the patricians and to win over the people to his side in a single stroke. Taking advantage of a suitable occasion for this, he cut all the aristocrats into pieces to the greatest satisfaction of the people. * Thus, Clearchus satisfied one of the wishes all peoples have, that is, to take revenge. But as for their other desire, to regain their liberty, since a prince cannot satisfy that he must examine the causes that make them wish to be free, and he will discover that a small part of the people wish to be free in order to command, but all the others, who are countless, desire liberty in order to live in safety. In all republics, no matter how they are organized, no more than forty or fifty citizens ever reach the ranks of command, and since this is a small number, it is an easy task to protect oneself from them, either by eliminating them or by bestowing upon them so many honours that, according to their standing, they will for the most part be content. The others for whom it is enough to live in safety can be easily satisfied by establishing institutions and passing laws which provide for both the prince’s personal power and the public safety. When a prince does this and the people realize that under no circumstances will he break these laws, they will begin in a short time to live in security and contentment. An example of this is the Kingdom of France, which lives in security for no other reason than the fact that its kings are constrained by countless laws which also provide for the security of all its people. The person who organized that state wanted the kings to do as they wished in military affairs and in financial affairs, but to dispose of every other matter as the laws ordained. Thus, that prince or that republic which has not made itself secure at the beginning of its rule must do so at the first opportunity, just as the Romans did. Anyone who allows the occasion to pass will repent too late for not having done what he should have done.

Since the Roman people were therefore not yet corrupt at the time they recovered their liberty, they were able to maintain it, once the sons of Brutus were dead and the Tarquins done away with, employing all those means and institutions we have previously discussed. But if that people had been corrupt, sound remedies capable of sustaining that liberty would not have been found either in Rome or elsewhere, as will be shown in the following chapter.