Cicero bases honour on our inherent excellence of nature, paying the same noble tribute to humanity as Kant some centuries after:  “On earth there is nothing great but man; in man there is nothing great but mind”.  Truth is a law of our nature.  Man is only “lower than the angels”; and to him belong prerogatives which mark him off from the brute creation—­the faculties of reason and discernment, the sense of beauty, and the love of law and order.  And from this arises that fellow—­feeling which, in one sense, “makes the whole world kin”—­the spirit of Terence’s famous line, which Cicero notices (applauded on its recitation, as Augustin tells us, by the cheers of the entire audience in the theatre)—­

  “Homo sum—­humani nihil a me alienum puto:”  [1]

for (he continues) “all men by nature love one another, and desire an intercourse of words and action”.  Hence spring the family affections, friendship, and social ties; hence also that general love of combination, which forms a striking feature of the present age, resulting in clubs, trades-unions, companies, and generally in what Mr. Carlyle terms “swarmery”.

[Footnote 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”.