e has received.
You regard these men, I suppose, as above bribes, as maintainers of the
truth: well, these very men will not be entrusted with money except on
the same terms. Would it not, then, be more honourable to be deceived
by some than to suspect all men of dishonesty? To fill up the measure
of avarice one thing only is lacking, that we should bestow no benefit
without a surety. To help, to be of service, is the part of a generous
and noble mind; he who gives acts like a god, he who demands repayment
acts like a money-lender. Why then, by trying to protect the rights of
the former class, should we reduce them to the level of the basest of
mankind?

XVI. "More men," our opponent argues, "will be ungrateful, if no legal
remedy exists against ingratitude." Nay, fewer, because then benefits
will be bestowed with more discrimination, In the next place, it is not
advisable that it should be publicly known how many ungrateful men there
are: for the number of sinners will do away with the disgrace of
the sin, and a reproach which applies to all men will cease to be
dishonourable. Is any woman ashamed of being divorced, now that some
noble ladies reckon the years of their lives, not by the number of the
consuls, but by that of their husbands, now that they leave their
homes in order to marry others, and marry only in order to be divorced?
Divorce was only dreaded as long as it was unusual; now that no gazette
appears without it, women learn to do what they hear so much about. Can
any one feel ashamed of adultery, now that things have come to such
a pass that no woman keeps a husband at all unless it be to pique her
lover? Chastity merely implies ugliness. Where will you find any woman
so abject, so repulsive, as to be satisfied with a single pair of
lovers, without having a different one for each hour of the day; nor is
the day long enough for all of them, unless she has taken her airing
in the grounds of one, and passes the night with another. A woman is
frumpish and old-fashioned if she does not know that "adultery with one
paramour is nick-named marriage." Just as all shame at these vices has
disappeared since the vice itself became so widely spread, so if you
made the ungrateful begin to count their own numbers, you would both
make them more numerous, and enable them to be ungrateful with greater
impunity.

XVII. "What then? shall the ungrateful man go unpunished?" What then,
I answer, shall we punish the undutiful,