ose traditional devices for winning favour with
the people, which tend to destroy that social concord and unity which
make a common wealth. "What reason is there", he asks, "why, when I have
bought, built, repaired, and laid out much money, another shall come and
enjoy the fruits of it?"

And as a man should be careful of the interests of the social body, so
he should be of his own. But Cicero feels that in descending to such
questions he is somewhat losing sight of his dignity as a moralist.
"You will find all this thoroughly discussed", he says to his son, "in
Xenophon's Economics--a book which, when I was just your age, I translated
from the Greek into Latin". [One wonders whether young Marcus took the
hint.] "And if you want instruction in money matters, there are gentlemen
sitting on the Exchange who will teach you much better than the
philosophers".

The last book opens with a saying of the elder Cato's, which Cicero much
admires, though he says modestly that he was never able in his own case
quite to realise it--"I am never less idle than when I am idle, and never
less alone than when alone". Retirement and solitude are excellent things,
Cicero always declares; generally contriving at the same time to make it
plain, as he does here, that his own heart is in the world of public life.
But at least it gives him time for writing. He "has written more in this
short time, since the fall of the Commonwealth, than in all the years
during which it stood".

He here resolves the question, If honour and interest seem to clash, which
is to give way? Or rather, it has been resolved already; if the right be
always the expedient, the opposition is seeming, not real. He puts a great
many questions of casuistry, but it all amounts to this: the good man
keeps his oath, "though it were to his own hindrance". But it is never to
his hindrance; for a violation of his conscience would be the greatest
hindrance of all.

In this treatise, more than in any of his other philosophical works,
Cicero inclines to the teaching of the Stoics. In the others, he is
rather the seeker after truth than the maintainer of a system. His is the
critical eclecticism of the 'New Academy'--the spirit so prevalent in our
own day, which fights against the shackles of dogmatism. And with all his
respect for the nobler side of Stoicism, he is fully alive to its defects;
though it was not given to him to see, as Milton saw after him, the point
wherein that gr