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[83]
Why do we gather instances of petty
crime—legacies criminally obtained and fraudulent
buying and selling? Behold, here you have a man
who was ambitious to be king of the Roman People
and master of the whole world; and he achieved it!
The man who maintains that such an ambition is1
morally right is a madman; for he justifies the destruction of law and liberty and thinks their hideous
and detestable suppression glorious. But if anyone
agrees that it is not morally right to be kind in a
state that once was free and that ought to be free
now, and yet imagines that it is advantageous for
him who can reach that position, with what remonstrance or rather with what appeal should I try to
tear him away from so strange a delusion? For, oh
ye immortal gods! can the most horrible and hideous
of all murders—that of fatherland—bring advantage
to anybody, even though he who has committed
such a crime receives from his enslaved fellow-citizens the title of “Father of his Country”?23
Expediency, therefore, must be measured by the
standard of moral rectitude, and in such a way, too,
that these two words shall seem in sound only to be
different but in real meaning to be one and the same.
M. Tullius Cicero. De Officiis. With An English Translation. Walter Miller. Cambridge. Harvard University Press; Cambridge, Mass., London, England. 1913.
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