The question sometimes presents itself *whether ** we shall bestow an immediate, yet transient benefit, or a more remote, but permanent good*. If the two are incompatible, and the former is not a matter of absolute necessity, the latter is to be preferred. Thus remunerative employment is much more beneficial than alms to an able-bodied man, and it is better that he suffer some degree of straitness till he can earn a more comfortable condition, than that he be first made to feel the dependence of pauperism. Yet if his want be entire and urgent, the delay of immediate relief is the part of cruelty. On similar grounds, beneficence which embraces a class of cases or persons is to be preferred to particular acts of kindness to individuals. Thus it seems harsh to refuse alms to an unknown street beggar; but as such relief gives shelter to a vast amount of fraud, idleness, and vice, it is much better that we should sustain, by contributions proportioned to our ability, some system by which cases of actual need, and such only, can be promptly and adequately cared for, and that we then—however reluctantly—refuse our alms to applicants of doubtful merit. Chapter XIV. ANCIENT HISTORY OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY. The numerous *ethical systems* that have had currency in earlier or later times, may be divided into two classes,—the one embracing those which make virtue a means; the other, those which make it an end. According to the former, virtue is to be practised for the good that will come of it; according to the latter, for its own sake, for its intrinsic excellence. These classes have obvious subdivisions. The former includes both the selfish and the utilitarian theory; while the latter embraces a wide diversity of views as to the nature, the standard, and the criterion of virtue, according as it is believed to consist in conformity to the fitness of things, in harmony with an unsophisticated taste, in accordance with the interior moral sense, or in obedience to the will of God. There are, also, border theories, which blend, or rather force into juxtaposition, the ideas that underlie the two classes respectively. It is proposed, in the present chapter, to give an outline of *the history of ethical philosophy in Greece and Rome*, or rather, in Greece; for Rome had no philosophy that was not born in Greece.