of unblemished reputation. Having been divorced from her
husband, she and the monster Sylla made love to each other at one of
these exhibitions of gladiators, and were soon after married. Gibbon,
in speaking of the lies which Severus told his two competitors in the
contest for empire, says, 'Falsehood and insincerity, unsuitable as
they seem to the dignity of public transactions, offend us with a
less degrading idea of meanness than when they are found in the
intercourse of private life. In the latter, they discover a want of
courage; in the other, only a defect of power; and, as it is
impossible for the most able statesmen to subdue millions of
followers and enemies by their own personal strength, the world,
under the name of _policy_, seems to have granted them a very liberal
indulgence of craft and dissimulation.'[17]

But the weak in society are often obliged to defend themselves
against the strong by the same weapons; and the world grants them the
same liberal indulgence. Men advocate the use of the ballot in
elections that the weak may defend themselves and the free
institutions of the country, by dissimulation, against the strong who
would oppress them.[18] The circumstances under which falsehood and
insincerity are tolerated by the community in the best societies of
modern days are very numerous; and the worst society of modern days
in the civilized world, when slavery does not prevail, is
immeasurably superior to the best in ancient days, or in the Middle
Ages. Do we not every day hear men and women, in what are called the
best societies, declaring to one individual or one set of
acquaintances that the pity, the sympathy, the love, or the
admiration they have been expressing for others is, in reality, all
feigned to soothe or please? As long as the motive is not base, men
do not spurn the falsehood as such. How much of untruth is tolerated
in the best circles of the most civilized nations, in the relations
between electors to corporate and legislative bodies and the
candidates for election? between nominators to offices under
Government and the candidates for nomination? between lawyers and
clients, vendors and purchasers? (particularly of horses), between
the recruiting sergeant and the young recruit, whom he has found a
little angry with his widowed mother, whom he makes him kill by false
pictures of what a soldier may hope for in the 'bellaque matribus
detestata' to which he invites him?[19]

There is, I