[42]
For what people have always sought
is equality of rights before the law. For rights that
were not open to all alike would be no rights. If
the people secured their end at the hands of one
just and good man, they were satisfied with that;
but when such was not their good fortune, laws were
invented, to speak to all men at all times in one and
the same voice.
This, then, is obvious: nations used to select for
their rulers those men whose reputation for justice
was high in the eyes of the people. If in addition
they were also thought wise, there was nothing that
men did not think they could secure under such
leadership. Justice is, therefore, in every way to be
cultivated and maintained, both for its own sake (for
otherwise it would not be justice) and for the enhancement of personal honour and glory.
But as there is a method not only of acquiring
money but also of investing it so as to yield an income to meet our continuously recurring expenses—both for the necessities and for the more refined
comforts of life—so there must be a method of gaining glory and turning it to account.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.