sexes, and of all ranks and ages,—­who annually graced the triumphs of their generals, taken off and murdered just at the moment when these generals reached the Capitol, amid the shouts of the multitude, that their joys might be augmented by the sight or consciousness of the sufferings of others? (See Hooke’s Roman History, vol. iii, p. 488; vol. iv, p. 541.) ’It was the custom that, when the triumphant conqueror tumed his chariot towards the Capitol, he commanded the captives to be led to prison, and there put to death, that so the glory of the victor and the miseries of the vanquished might be in the same moment at the utmost.’  How many millions of the most innocent and amiable of their species must have been offered up as human sacrifices to the triumphs of the leaders of this great gang!  The women were almost as brutalized as the men; lovers met to talk ‘soft nonsense’, at exhibitions of gladiators.  Valeria, the daughter and sister of two of the first men in Rome, was beautiful, gay, and lively, and of unblemished reputation.  Having been divorced from her husband, she and the monster Sylla made love to each other at one of these exhibitions of gladiators, and were soon after married.  Gibbon, in speaking of the lies which Severus told his two competitors in the contest for empire, says, ’Falsehood and insincerity, unsuitable as they seem to the dignity of public transactions, offend us with a less degrading idea of meanness than when they are found in the intercourse of private life.  In the latter, they discover a want of courage; in the other, only a defect of power; and, as it is impossible for the most able statesmen to subdue millions of followers and enemies by their own personal strength, the world, under the name of policy, seems to have granted them a very liberal indulgence of craft and dissimulation.’[17]

But the weak in society are often obliged to defend themselves against the strong by the same weapons; and the world grants them the same liberal indulgence.  Men advocate the use of the ballot in elections that the weak may defend themselves and the free institutions of the country, by dissimulation, against the strong who would oppress them.[18] The circumstances under which falsehood and insincerity are tolerated by the community in the best societies of modern days are very numerous; and the worst society of modern days in the civilized world, when slavery does not prevail, is immeasurably superior to the best in ancient days, or in the Middle Ages.  Do we not every day hear men and women, in what are called the best societies, declaring to one individual or one set of acquaintances that the pity, the sympathy, the love, or the admiration they have been expressing for others is, in reality, all feigned to soothe or please?  As long as the motive is not base, men do not spurn the falsehood as such.  How much of untruth is tolerated in the best circles of the most civilized nations, in the relations between electors to corporate and legislative