Though I see that this, on account of the corruption of manners, is neither esteemed base in morals, nor forbidden either by statutable enactments or by civil law; yet it is forbidden by the law of nature. For there is the social tie between man and man which is of the widest extent, which, though I have often mentioned it, yet needs to be mentioned oftener. There is a closer tie between those who are of the same nation; a closer still between those who are of the same state. Our ancestors, therefore, were of opinion that the law of nations was one thing, the municipal law a different thing. Whatever is civil law, the same is not, for that reason, necessarily the law of nations; but whatever is the law of nations, the same ought to be civil law. But we possess no solid and express image of true right and its sister justice: we use merely their shade and faint resemblances. Would that we followed even these, for they are taken from the best patterns of nature and truth! For how admirable are those words, "that I be not ensnared and defrauded on account of you and your honesty." What golden words those "that among honest men there be fair dealing, and without fraud." But who are honest men, and what is fair dealing, is the great question. Quintus Scævola, indeed, the high priest, used to say that there was the greatest weight in all those decisions. in which was added the form "of good faith ;" and he thought the jurisdiction of good faith extended very widely, and that it was concerned in wardships, societies, trusts, commissions, buyings, sellings, hirings, lettings, in which the intercourse of life is comprised; that in these it is the part of a great judge to determine (especially since there were contrary decisions in most cases) what each ought to be accountable for to each. Wherefore craftiness ought to be put away, and that knavery which would fain seem, indeed, to be prudence, but which is far from it, and differs most widely. For prudence consists in the distinguishing of

1 Addison carries out this distinction far more elaborately. "At tho same time," he says, "that I think discretion the most useful talent a man can be master of, I look upon cunning to be the accomplishment of little, mean, ungenerous minds. Discretion points out the noblest ends to us, and pursues the most proper and laudable methods of attaining them. Cunning has only private, selfish aims, and sticks at nothing which may make them succeed. Discretion has large and extended views, and, like a well-formed eye, commands a whole horizon. Cunning is a kind of short

good and evil-knavery, if all things that are vicious are evil, prefers evil to good.

Nor is it, indeed, in landed property alone that the civil law deduced from nature punishes knavery and fraud, but also in the sale of slaves, all fraud of the seller is prevented. For he who ought to be aware of the health, the running away, the thefts of slaves, is accountable by the edict of the Ediles; but the case of heirs is different.' From which it will be understood, since nature is the fountain of right, that it is according to nature that no one should act in such a manner, that be should prey on the ignorance of another. Nor can there be found in life any greater curse sightedness that discovers the minutest objects which are near at hand, but is not able to discern things at a distance. Discretion, the more it is discovered, gives a greater authority to the person who possesses it. Cunning, when it is once detected, loses its force, and makes a man incapable of bringing about even those events which he might have done had he passed only for a plain man. Discretion is the perfection of reason, and a guide to us in all the duties of life; cunning is a kind of instinct that only looks out after our immediate interest and welfare. Discretion is only found in men of strong sense and good understanding; cunning is often to be met with in brutes themselves, and in persons who are but the fewest removes from them. In short, cunning is only the mimic of discretion, and may pass upon mean men in the same manner as vivacity is often mistaken for wit, and gravity for wisdom."-Spectator, No. 225.

1 Because an heir, having only just come into possession of the property, consisting of slaves, might fairly be considered ignorant of their evil qualities.

2 We have here a singular proof of the facility with which men, even when analyzing the nicest moral obligations, may be insensible to the grossest violations of moral fitness involved in the social institutions amid which they have been educated. In connection with this nice casuistry touching the sale of a slave, it is curious to peruse the following description of the state of things which existed at the very time when Cicero penned his treatise:

"The custom of exposing old, useless, or sick slaves in an island of the Tyber, there to starve, seems to have been pretty common in Rome; and whoever recovered, after having been so exposed, had his liberty given him by an edict of the Emperor Claudius; in which it was likewise forbidden to kill any slave merely for old age or sickness. But supposing that this edict was strictly obeyed, would it better the domestic treatment of slaves, or render their lives much more comfortable? We may imagine what others would practice, when it was the professed maxim of the elder Cato to sell his superannuated slaves for any price, rather than maintain what he esteemed a useless burden.

"The ergastula, or dungeons where slaves in chains were forced to

than the pretense of wisdom in knavery; from which those innumerable cases proceed, where the useful seems to be opposed to the virtuous. For how few will be found who, when promised perfect secrecy and impunity, can abstain from injustice? XVIII. Let us test the principle, if you please, in those examples in which, indeed, the mass of mankind do not think perhaps that there is any crime. For it is not necessary in this place to treat of assassins, poisoners, will-forgers, robbers, embezzlers, who are to be kept down, not by means of words and the disputation of philosophers, but by chains and a dungeon. But let us consider these acts, which they who are esteemed honest men commit. Some persons brought from Greece to Rome a forged will of Lucius Minucius Basilus, a rich man. That they might the more easily obtain their object, they put down as legatees along with themselves, Marcus Crassus and Quintus Hortensius, the most powerful men of that day; who, though they suspected that it was a forgery, but were conscious of no crime in themselves, did work, were very common all over Italy. Columella advises that they be always built under ground, and recommends it as the duty of a careful overseer to call over every day the names of the slaves, like the mustering of a regiment or ship's company, in order to know presently when any of them had deserted; a proof of the frequency of these ergastula and of the great number of slaves usually confined in them.

"A chained slave for a porter was usual in Rome, as appears from Ovid and other authors. Had not these people shaken off all sense of compassion toward that unhappy part of their species, would they have presented their friends, at the first entrance, with such an image of the severity of the master and misery of the slave? Nothing so common in all trials, even of civil causes, as to call for the evidence of slaves; which was always extorted by the most exquisite torment. Demosthenes says that where it was possible to produce, for the same fact, either freemen or slaves, as witnesses, the judges always preferred the torturing of slaves as a more certain evidence.

"Seneca draws a picture of that disorderly luxury which changes day into night, and night into day, and inverts every stated hour of every office in life. Among other circumstances, such as displacing the meals and times of bathing, he mentions, that regularly, about the third hour of the night, the neighbors of one who indulges this false refinement, hear the noise of whips and lashes; and, upon inquiry, find that he is then taking an account of the conduct of his servants, and giving them due correction and discipline.

"This is not remarked as an instance of cruelty, but only of disorder, which ever in actions the most usual and methodical changes the fixed hours that an established custom had assigned for them."-Hume's Essays, Part ii. Essay 11.

What

not reject the paltry gift of other men's villainy. then? Was this enough, that they should not be thought to have been culpable? To me, indeed, it seems otherwise; though I loved one of them when living, and do not hate the other, now that he is dead. But when Basilus had willed that Marcus Satrius, his sister's son, should bear his name, and had made him his heir (I am speaking of him who was patron of the Picene and Sabine districts; oh! foul stigma upon those times!') was it fair that those noble citizens should have the property, and that nothing but the name should come down to Satrius? For if he who does not keep off an injury, nor repel it if he can from another, acts unjustly, as I asserted in the first book, what is to be thought of him who not only does not repel, but even assists in the injury? To me, indeed, even true legacies do not seem honorable, if they are acquired by deceitful fawning-not by the reality, but by the semblance of kind offices. But in such matters the profitable is sometimes accustomed to be thought one thing, and the honest another thing. Falsely; for the rule about profit is the same as that which obtains respecting honesty. To him who will not thoroughly perceive this, no fraud, no villainy will be wanting; for, considering thus, that, indeed, is honest, but this is expedient," he will dare erroneously to separate things united by nature-which is the fountain of all frauds, malpractices, and crimes.

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XIX. If a good man, then, should have this power, that by snapping his fingers his name could creep by stealth into the wills of the wealthy, he would not use this power, not even if he had it for certain that no one at all would ever suspect it. But should you give this power to Marcus Crassus, that by the snapping of his fingers he could be inscribed heir, when he really was not heir; believe me, he would have danced in the forum. But the just man, and he whom we deem a good man, would take nothing from any man in order to transfer it wrongfully to himself. Let him who is surprised at this confess that he is ignorant of what

1 Marcus Satrius, having taken his uncle's name, Lucius Minucius Basilus, was chosen as patron by those districts-he was a partisan of Cæsar in the civil war. In the eyes of Cicero it was, of course, a foul stain upon the times that a friend of Cæsar should be chosen as patron, especially since, as he insinuates in the 2d Phillippic, it was through fear, not love, he was selected for that honor.

constitutes a good man. But if any one would be willing to develop the ilca involved in his own mind,' he would at once convince himself that a good man is he who serves whom he can, and injures none except when provoked by injury. What then? Does he hurt none, who, as if by some enchantment, accomplishes the exclusion of the true heirs, and the substitution of himself in their place? Should he not do, then, somebody will say, what is useful, what is expedient? Yes, but he should understand that nothing is either expedient or useful which is unjust. He who has

not learned this, can not be a good man.

2

When a boy, I learned from my father that Fimbria, the consular, was judge in the case of Marcus Lutatius Pinthia, Roman knight, a truly honest man, when he had given security, (which he was to forfeit) "unless he was a good man" and that Fimbria thereupon told him that he never would decide that matter, lest he should either deprive a worthy man of his character, if he decided against him, or should be seen to have established that any onc was a good man, when this matter was comprised in innumerable duties and praiseworthy actions. To this good man, then, whom even Fimbria, not Socrates alone had

1 The commentator, from whom I have already quoted, gives the following explanation of this passage. From the Platonic school Cicero seems to have imbibed a persuasion, not merely that ideas are innate, but that they were acquired during a pre-existent state of the mind or soul. "Habet primum (se animus hominis) memoriam et eam infinitam, rerum innumerabilium quam quidem Plato recordationem esse vult superioris vitæ. Ex quo effici vult Socrates, ut discere nihil aliud sit quam recor dari. Nec vero fieri ullo modo posse ut a pueris tot rerum atque tantarum insitas, et quasi consignatas in animis, notiones, quas évvoías vocant, haberemus, nisi animus, antequam in corpus intrasset, in rerum cognitione viquisset.' Tull. Q. I. 24. He states also, Tull. Q. IV. c. 24., "Notionem quam habemus omnes de fortitudine, tactam et involutam." In the present passage he appears to speak in the same tone, of developing the notion we have, though indistinctly, in our minds of perfection of moral character.

2 So called to distinguish him from Caius Fimbria, who having by his intrigues occasioned the death of Lucius Flaccus, the proconsul of Asia (eighty-five years B.C.), was subsequently conquered by Sylla, and terminated his career by suicide.

3 The "sponsio" was a sum deposited in court, or promised with the usual formula-ni veram causam haberet. If the party who thus gave security was defeated, the money was forfeited to the treasury.