opposition to it. His cruelty or his clemency might be more or less,
as his conviction of the utility of this or that other weapon for
dominating men might be strong with him. Or there might be some
variation in the flowing of the blood about his heart which might make
a massacre of citizens a pleasing diversion or a painful process to
him; but there was no conscience. With the man of whom we are about
to speak conscience was strong. In his sometimes doubtful wanderings
after political wisdom--in those mental mazes which have been called
insincerity--we shall see him, if we look well into his doings,
struggling to find whether, in searching for what was his duty, he
should go to this side or to that. Might he best hope a return to that
state of things which he thought good for his country by adhering to
Caesar or to Pompey? We see the workings of his conscience, and, as
we remember that Scipio's dream of his, we feel sure that he had, in
truth, within him a recognition of a future life.

In discussing the character of a man, there is no course of error so
fertile as the drawing of a hard and fast line. We are attracted by
salient points, and, seeing them clearly, we jump to conclusions, as
though there were a light-house on every point by which the nature of
the coast would certainly be shown to us. And so it will, if we accept
the light only for so much of the shore as it illumines. But to say
that a man is insincere because he has vacillated in this or the other
difficulty, that he is a coward because he has feared certain dangers,
that he is dishonest because he has swerved, that he is a liar because
an untrue word has been traced to him, is to suppose that you know all
the coast because one jutting headland has been defined to you. He who
so expresses himself on a man's character is either ignorant of human
nature, or is in search of stones with which to pelt his enemy. "He
has lied! He has lied!" How often in our own political contests do we