It is the philosophy of the "Predominant Partner." If he had thanked God for having our throats to cut, and cut them with loud gratitude like Cromwell, a later generation would be incensed.

But this other attitude is the gall in the cup.
Macaulay is, of course, shocked by Machiavelli's "Prince." In his essay on Machiavelli we read: "It is indeed scarcely possible for any person not well acquainted with the history and literature of Italy to read without horror and amazement the celebrated treatise which has brought so much obloquy on the name of Machiavelli.

Such a display of wickedness, naked, yet not ashamed, such cool, judicious, scientific atrocity, seemed rather to belong to a fiend than to the most depraved of men." But, later, in the same essay, is a valuable sidelight.

He writes of Machiavelli as a man "whose only fault was that, having adopted some of the maxims then generally received, he arranged them most luminously and expressed them more forcibly than any other writer." Here we have the truth, of course not so intended, but evident: Machiavelli's crime is not for the sentiments he entertained but for writing them down luminously and forcibly--in other words, for giving the show away.
Think of Macaulay's "horror and amazement," and read this further in the same essay: "Every man who has seen the world knows that nothing is so useless as a general maxim.

If it be very moral and very true it may serve for a copy to a charity boy." So the very moral and the very true are not for the statesman but for the charity-boy.