come upon us, which destroy all that is holy and inviolable.
Sometimes even drunkenness will be held in honour, and it will be a
virtue to swallow most wine. Vices do not lie in wait for us in one
place alone, but hover around us in changeful forms, sometimes even
at variance one with another, so that in turn they win and lose the
field; yet we shall always be obliged to pronounce the same verdict
upon ourselves, that we are and always were evil, and, I
unwillingly add, that we always shall be. There always will be
homicides, tyrants, thieves, adulterers, ravishers, sacrilegious,
traitors: worse than all these is the ungrateful man, except we
consider that all these crimes flow from ingratitude, without which
hardly any great wickedness has ever grown to full stature. Be sure
that you guard against this as the greatest of crimes in yourself,
but pardon it as the least of crimes in another. For all the injury
which you suffer is this: you have lost the subject-matter of a
benefit, not the benefit itself, for you possess unimpaired the
best part of it, in that you have given it. Though we ought to be
careful to bestow our benefits by preference upon those who are
likely to show us gratitude for them, yet we must sometimes do what
we have little hope will turn out well, and bestow benefits upon
those who we not only think will prove ungrateful, but who we know
have been so. For instance, if I should be able to save a man's
children from a great danger with no risk to myself, I should not
hesitate to do so. If a man be worthy I would defend him even with
my blood, and would share his perils; if he be unworthy, and yet by
merely crying for help I can rescue him from robbers, I would
without reluctance raise the shout which would save a fellow-
creature.

XI. The next point to be defined is, what kind of benefits are to