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 great man’s bounty (as he says in another place) should be a common sanctuary for the needy.  “To ransom captives and enrich the meaner folk is a nobler form of generosity than providing wild beasts or shows of gladiators to amuse the mob”.  Charity should begin at home; for relations and friends hold the first place in our affections; but the circle of our good deeds is not to be narrowed by the ties of blood, or sect, or party, and “our country comprehends the endearments of all”.  We should act in the spirit of the ancient law—­“Thou shalt keep no man from the running stream, or from lighting his torch at thy hearth”.  Our liberality should be really liberal,—­like that charity which Jeremy Taylor describes as “friendship to all the world”.

Another component principle of this honour is courage, or “greatness of soul”, which (continues Cicero) has been well defined by the Stoics as “a virtue contending for justice and honesty”; and its noblest form is a generous contempt for ordinary objects of ambition, not “from a vain or fantastic humour, but from solid principles of reason”.  The lowest and commoner form of courage is the mere animal virtue of the fighting-cock.

But a character should not only be excellent,—­it should be graceful.  In gesture and deportment men should strive to acquire that dignified grace of manners “which adds as it were a lustre to our lives”.  They should avoid affectation and eccentricity; “not to care a farthing what people think of us is a sign not so much of pride as of immodesty”.  The want of tact—­the saying and doing things at the wrong time and place—­produces the same discord in society as a false note in music; and harmony of character is of more consequence than harmony of sounds.  There is a grace in words as well as in conduct:  we should avoid unseasonable jests, “and not lard our talk with Greek quotations".[1]

[Footnote 1:  This last precept Cicero must have considered did not apply to letter-writing, otherwise he was a notorious offender against his own rule.]

In the path of life, each should follow the bent of his own genius, so far as it is innocent—­

  “Honour and shame from no condition rise;
  Act well your part—­there all the honour lies”.