But laws are
deaf, inexorable things, such as make no difference between a
gentleman and an ordinary fellow; a man can never be merry for
them, for to trust altogether to his own innocence is a sad
life." Unhappy wantons! Scipio, on the other side, when he was
but a boy (about two or three and twenty), being informed that
certain patricians of Roman gentlemen, through a qualm upon the
defeat which Hannibal had given them at Cannae, were laying their
heads together and contriving their flight with the
transportation of their goods out of Rome, drew his sword, and
setting himself at the door of the chamber where they were at
council, protested "that who did not immediately swear not to
desert the commonwealth, he would make his soul to desert his
body." Let men argue as they please for monarchy, or against a
commonwealth, the world shall never see any man so sottish or
wicked as in cool blood to prefer the education of the sons of
Brutus before that of Scipio; and of this mould, except a Melius
or a Manlius, was the whole youth of that commonwealth, though
not ordinarily so well cast.
Now the health of a government and the education of the youth
being of the same pulse, no wonder if it has been the constant
practice of well-ordered commonwealths to commit the care and
feeling of it to public magistrates.
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