Wherefore the laws of a government, how wholesome soever in themselves,
are such as, if men by a congruity in their education be not bred to
find a relish in them, they will be sure to loathe and detest. The
education therefore of a man’s own children is not wholly to be
committed or trusted to himself. You find in Livy the children of
Brutus, having been bred under monarchy, and used to a court life,
making faces at the Commonwealth of Rome: “A king (say they) is a man
with whom you may prevail when you have need there should be law, or
when you have need there should be no law; he has favors in the right,
and he frowns not in the wrong place; he knows his friends from
his enemies. 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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