Q. What is filial love?

A. It is, on the side of children, the practice of those actions useful to themselves and to their parents.

Q. How does the law of nature prescribe filial love?

A. By three principal motives: 

1.  By sentiment; for the affectionate care of parents inspires, from the most tender age, mild habits of attachment.

2.  By justice; for children owe to their parents a return and indemnity for the cares, and even for the expenses, they have caused them.

3.  By personal interest; for, if they use them ill, they give to their own children examples of revolt and ingratitude, which authorize them, at a future day, to behave to themselves in a similar manner.

Q. Are we to understand by filial love a passive and blind submission?

A. No; but a reasonable submission, founded on the knowledge of the mutual rights and duties of parents and children; rights and duties, without the observance of which their mutual conduct is nothing but disorder.

Q. Why is fraternal love a virtue?

A. Because the concord and union, which result from the love of brothers, establish the strength, security, and conservation of the family:  brothers united defend themselves against all oppression, they aid one another in their wants, they help one another in their misfortunes, and thus secure their common existence; while brothers disunited, abandoned each to his own personal strength, fall into all the inconveniences attendant on an insulated state and individual weakness.  This is what a certain Scythian king ingeniously expressed when, on his death-bed, calling his children to him, he ordered them to break a bundle of arrows.  The young men, though strong, being unable to effect it, he took them in his turn, and untieing them, broke each of the arrows separately with his fingers.  “Behold,” said he, “the effects of union; united together, you will be invincible; taken separately, you will be broken like reeds.”

Q. What are the reciprocal duties of masters and of servants?

A. They consist in the practice of the actions which are respectively and justly useful to them; and here begin the relations of society; for the rule and measure of those respective actions is the equilibrium or equality between the service and the recompense, between what the one returns and the other gives; which is the fundamental basis of all society.

Thus all the domestic and individual virtues refer, more or less mediately, but always with certitude, to the physical object of the amelioration and preservation of man, and are thereby precepts resulting from the fundamental law of nature in his formation.

CHAPTER XI.

The social virtues; justice.

Q. What is society?

A. It is every reunion of men living together under the clauses of an expressed or tacit contract, which has for its end their common preservation.