ote 1: "I am a man--I hold that nothing which concerns mankind can
be matter of unconcern to me".]

Next to truth, justice is the great duty of mankind. Cicero at once
condemns "communism" in matters of property. Ancient immemorial seizure,
conquest, or compact, may give a title; but "no man can say that he has
anything his own by a right of nature". Injustice springs from avarice or
ambition, the thirst of riches or of empire, and is the more dangerous as
it appears in the more exalted spirits, causing a dissolution of all ties
and obligations. And here he takes occasion to instance "that late most
shameless attempt of Caesar's to make himself master of Rome".

There is, besides, an injustice of omission. You may wrong your neighbour
by seeing him wronged without interfering. Cicero takes the opportunity of
protesting strongly against the selfish policy of those lovers of ease and
peace, who, "from a desire of furthering their own interests, or else from
a churlish temper, profess that they mind nobody's business but their own,
in order that they may seem to be men of strict integrity and to injure
none", and thus shrink from taking their part in "the fellowship of
life". He would have had small patience with our modern doctrine of
non-intervention and neutrality in nations any more than in men. Such
conduct arises (he says) from the false logic with which men cheat
their conscience; arguing reversely, that whatever is the best policy
is--honesty.

There are two ways, it must be remembered, in which one man may injure
another--force and fraud; but as the lion is a nobler creature than the
fox, so open violence seems less odious than secret villany. No character
is so justly hateful as

"A rogue in grain,
Veneered with sanctimonious theory".

Nations have their obligations as well as individuals, and war has its
laws as well as peace. The struggle should be carried on in a generous
temper, and not in the spirit of extermination, when "it has sometimes
seemed a question between two hostile nations, not which should remain a
conqueror, but which should remain a nation at all".

No mean part of justice consists in liberality, and this, too, has its
duties. It is an important question, how, and when, and to whom, we should
give? It is possible to be generous at another person's expense: it is
possible to injure the recipient by mistimed liberality; or to ruin one's
fortune by open house and prodigal hospitality. A