employment.

Accordingly I am now going to throw off reserve, come to grips with the
charge against me, and prove my case _a fortiori_. I tell you that nobody
does anything for nothing; you may point to people in high places--as high
as you like; the Emperor himself is paid. I am not referring to the taxes
and tribute which flow in annually from subjects; the chief item in the
Emperor's pay is panegyrics, world-wide fame, and grateful devotion; the
statues, temples, and consecrated ground which their subjects bestow upon
them, what are these but pay for the care and forethought which they apply
to public policy and improvements? To compare small things with great, if
you will begin at the top of the heap and work down through the grains of
which it is composed, you will find that we inferior ones differ from the
superior in point of size, but all are wage-earners together.

If the law I laid down had been that no one should do anything, I might
fairly have been accused of transgressing it; but as my book contains
nothing of the sort, and as goodness consists in doing good, what better
use can you make of yourself than if you join forces with your friends in
the cause of progress, come out into the open, and let men see that you
are loyal and zealous and careful of your trust, not what Homer calls a
vain cumberer of the earth?

But before all, my critics are to remember that in me they will be
criticizing not a wise man (if indeed there is such a person on earth),
but one of the common people, one who has indeed practised rhetoric and
won some little reputation therein, but has never been trained up to the
perfect virtue of the really great. Well, I may surely be forgiven for
that; if any one ever did come up to the ideal of the wise man, it has
not been my fortune to meet him. And I confess further that I should be