4. ¶The populace, as soon as Valerius the dictator became a private citizen, began a most bitter contest, going so far even as to overturn the government. The well-to-do classes insisted, in the case of debts, upon the very letter of the agreement, refusing to abate one iota of it, and so they both failed to secure its fulfillment and came to be deprived of many other advantages; they had failed to recognize the fact that an extreme of poverty is the heaviest of curses and that the desperation which results from it is, especially if shared by a large number of persons, very difficult to combat. This is why not a few politicians voluntarily choose the course which is expedient in preference to that which is absolutely just. Justice is often worsted in an encounter with human nature and sometimes suffers total extinction, whereas expediency, by parting with a mere fragment of justice, preserves the greater portion of it intact. Now the cause of most of the troubles that the Romans had lay in the unyielding attitude adopted by the more powerful class toward its inferiors. Many remedies were afforded them against delays in payment of debts, one of which was that in case it happened that several persons had been lending to anybody, they had authority to divide his body piecemeal according to the proportionate amounts that he was owing. Yet, however much this principle had been declared legal, still it had surely never been put into practice. For how could a nation have proceeded to such lengths of cruelty when it frequently granted to those convicted of some crime a refuge for their preservation and allowed such as were thrust from the cliffs of the Capitoline to live in case they should survive the experience? (Mai, p.143. Cp. Zonaras. 7, 14.)