What is the advantage of one's own country but the disadvantage of another state or nation, by extending one's dominions by territories evidently wrested from others, increasing one's power, improving one's revenues, etc.? Therefore, whoever has obtained these advantages for his country—that is to say, whoever has overthrown cities, subdued nations, and by these means filled the treasury with money, taken lands, and enriched his fellow-citizens—such a man is extolled to the skies; is believed to be endowed with consummate and perfect virtue; and this mistake is fallen into not only by the populace and the ignorant, but by philosophers, who even give rules for injustice.
XIV. * * * For all those who have the right of life and death over the people are in fact tyrants; but they prefer being called by the title of king, which belongs to the all-good Jupiter. But when certain men, by favor of wealth, birth, or any other means, get possession of the entire government, it is a faction; but they choose to denominate themselves an aristocracy. If the people gets the upper hand, and rules everything after its capricious will, they call it liberty, but it is in fact license. And when every man is a guard upon his neighbor, and every class is a guard upon every other class, then because no one trusts in his own strength, a kind of compact is formed between the great and the little, from whence arises that mixed kind of government which Scipio has been commending. Thus justice, according to these facts, is not the daughter of nature or conscience, but of human imbecility. For when it becomes necessary to choose between these three predicaments, either to do wrong without retribution, or to do wrong with retribution, or to do no wrong at all, it is best to do wrong with impunity; next, neither to do wrong nor to suffer for it; but nothing is more wretched than to struggle incessantly between the wrong we inflict and that we receive. Therefore, he who attains to that first end[1] * * *
- ↑ A great many pages are missing here.
