The last line of chapter seventeen is its point: when the work is finished and the business done, the people all say it happened of itself.
The phrase rendered of itself is one of the book's key terms, usually given as spontaneous or self-so, and it appears at the end of chapter twenty-five, where the way itself takes its rule from what is so of itself. Applying it to a population's account of its own affairs is a considerable claim. The best government is one that produces, in the governed, the accurate impression that they were not governed.
Whether the impression is accurate is left ambiguous, and the ambiguity is worth sitting with rather than resolving. On one reading the ruler genuinely did very little, and the people are right. On another he did a great deal and did it invisibly, and the people are mistaken in a way he arranged. The first is a philosophy of restraint; the second is a technique of management, and the book has been read both ways by people with very different aims.
The chapter's preceding line points slightly toward the second: the ruler is described as careful and sparing with words, which is a description of someone exercising judgement rather than of someone absent.
That unresolved edge runs through the whole political section of the book and is why chapters like thirty-six and sixty-five have been read as statecraft of a distinctly hard kind.