e truth more vividly through the
force of contrast, he pleads with the utmost ingenuity the
cause of injustice against justice; and endeavors to show, by
plausible examples and specious dialectics, that injustice is
as useful to a statesman as justice would be injurious. Then
Laelius, at the general request, takes up the plea for
justice, and maintains with all his eloquence that nothing
could be so ruinous to states as injustice and dishonesty,
and that without a supreme justice, no political government
could expect a long duration. This point being sufficiently
proved, Scipio returns to the principal discussion. He
reproduces and enforces the short definition that he had
given of a commonwealth--that it consisted in the welfare of
the entire people, by which word 'people' he does not mean
the mob, but the community, bound together by the sense of
common rights and mutual benefits. He notices how important
such just definitions are in all debates whatever, and draws
this conclusion from the preceding arguments--that the
Commonwealth is the common welfare whenever it is swayed with
justice and wisdom, whether it be subordinated to a king, an
aristocracy, or a democracy. But if the king be unjust, and
so becomes a tyrant; and the aristocracy unjust, which makes
them a faction; or the democrats unjust, and so degenerate
into revolutionists and destructives--then not only the
Commonwealth is corrupted, but in fact annihilated. For it
can be no longer the common welfare when a tyrant or a
faction abuse it; and the people itself is no longer the
people when it becomes unjust, since it is no longer a
community associated by a sense of right and utility,
according to the definition."--_Aug. Civ. Dei._ 3-21.

This book is of the utmost importance to statesmen, as it
serves to neutralize the sophistries of Machiavelli, which
are still repeated in many cabinets.

BOOK III.

I. * * *[331] Cicero, in the third book of his treatise On a
Commonwealth, says that nature has treated man less like a mother than
a step-dame, for she has cast him into mortal life with a body naked,
fragile, and infirm, and with a mind agitated by troubles, depressed by
fears, broken by labors, and exposed to passions. In this mind,
however, there lies hidden, and, as it were, buried, a ce