[13]
Then,
too, there would surely be no exportation of our
superfluous commodities or importation of those we
lack, did not men perform these services. By the
same process of reasoning, without the labour of
man's hands, the stone needful for our use would
not be quarried from the earth, nor would “iron, copper, gold, and silver, hidden far within,” be mined.
4. And how could houses ever have been provided 1 in the first place for the human race, to keep
out the rigours of the cold and alleviate the discomforts of the heat; or how could the ravages of
furious tempest or of earthquake or of time upon
them afterward have been repaired, had not the
bonds of social life taught men in such events to
look to their fellow-men for help?
1 Mutual helpfulness the key to civilization.
M. Tullius Cicero. De Officiis. With An English Translation. Walter Miller. Cambridge. Harvard University Press; Cambridge, Mass., London, England. 1913.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
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.