Letters from Machiavelli to Mr. Girardin.

For some time now, the newspaper Liberté has been publishing, signed by Mr. Aimé Dolfus, a series of political articles under the heading: Letters from Machiavelli to Mr. Girardin, n whose spirit it is not for us to analyze. But we recognize with lively satisfaction that, if the editors of Liberté are not Spiritists, they are skillful enough to make use of the principles of Spiritism that may interest their readers. Certainly one should see in these letters nothing more than a form, a product of the imagination appropriated by the author to present circumstances. Our framework and the special object of our studies oblige us only to reproduce the following passage, which we publish without any comment, referring our readers, for fuller details, to the appraisal made of them by Mr. Allan Kardec, in the communication entitled: Spiritism and contemporary literature. We cite textually: “Among the few men of your generation who best knew how to grasp and assimilate my ideas, to put into practice my doctrines, to abandon the politics of passion for that of conciliation, to disdain governmental forms in order to fix themselves upon the substance of things, there is one whose public life seems an isolated page of the history of my time.

“He is my contemporary almost as much as yours; he is your friend as he was my friend. For the second time he allows himself a mission of pacification, playing a moderating role whose scope and grandeur the nineteenth century seems no more to divine than did the parties of the sixteenth century. He had already attempted, in the time of the Medici, what he has just attempted, with more success, under the Napoleons. Before using the name you know, sir, and which I need not write, he was called François Guichardin.

“Historian and statesman in his first incarnation, he revealed himself, in the second, an orator of the first order. These two personalities have so many points of contact that I believe I may confound them into one.”

Liberté (September 4, 1869.)

[A. DESLIENS.]

[1] See the newspaper Liberté, numbers of August 31, September 2 and 4.