In his treatise On Clemency, dedicated to his youthful pupil Nero, he anticipates the very modern theory—theory, for the prevalent practice is a very different thing—that prevention is better than punishment, and he denounces the cruel and selfish policy of princes and magistrates, who are, for the most part, concerned only to punish the criminals produced by unjust and unequal laws:—
“Will not that man,” he asks, “appear to be a very bad father who punishes his children, even for the slightest causes, with constant blows? Which preceptor is the worthier to teach—the one who scarifies his pupils’ backs if their memory happens to fail them, or if their eyes make a slight blunder in reading, or he who chooses rather to correct and instruct by admonition and the influence of shame?... You will find that those crimes are most often committed which are most often punished.... Many capital punishments are no less disgraceful to a ruler than are many deaths to a physician. Men are more easily governed by mild laws. The human mind is naturally stubborn and inclined to be perverse, and it more readily follows than is forced. The disposition to cruelty which takes delight in blood and wounds is the characteristic of wild beasts; it is to throw away the human character and to pass into that of a denizen of the woods.”
Speaking of giving assistance to the needy, he says that the genuine philanthropist will give his money—
“Not in that insulting way in which the great majority of those who wish to seem merciful disdain and despise those whom they help, and shrink from contact with them, but as one mortal to a fellow-mortal he will give as though out of a treasury that should be common to all.”[33]
Next to the De Clementiâ and the De Irâ (“On Anger”), his treatise On the Happy Life is most admirable. In the abundance of what is unusually good and useful it is difficult to choose. His warning (so unheeded) against implicit confidence in authority and tradition cannot be too often repeated:—
“There is nothing against which we ought to be more on our guard than, like a flock of sheep, following the crowd of those who have preceded us—going, as we do, not where we ought to go, but where men have walked before. And yet there is nothing which involves us in greater evils than following and settling our faith upon authority—considering those dogmas or practices best which have been received heretofore with the greatest applause, and which have a multitude of great names. We live not according to reason, but according to mere fashion and tradition, from whence that enormous heap of bodies, which fall one over the other. It happens as in a great slaughter of men, when the crowd presses upon itself. Not one falls without dragging with him another. The first to fall are the cause of destruction to the succeeding ranks. It runs through the whole of human life. No-one’s error is limited to himself alone, but he is the author and cause of another’s error.... We shall recover our sound health if only we shall separate ourselves from the herd, for the crowd of mankind stands opposed to right reason—the defender of its own evils and miseries.[34] ... Human history is not so well conducted, that the better way is pleasing to the mass. The very fact of the approbation of the multitude is a proof of the badness of the opinion or practice. Let us ask what is best, not what is most customary; what may place us firmly in the possession of an everlasting felicity, not what has received the approbation of the vulgar—the worst interpreter of the truth. Now I call “the vulgar” the common herd of all ranks and conditions” (Tam chlamydatos quam coronatos).—(De Vitâ Beatâ i. and ii.)
Again:—
“I will do nothing for the sake of opinion; everything for the sake of conscience.”
He repudiates the doctrines of Egoism for those of Altruism:—
“I will so live, as knowing myself to have come into the world for others.... I shall recognise the world as my proper country. Whenever nature or reason shall demand my last breath I shall depart with the testimony that I have loved a good conscience, useful pursuits—that I have encroached upon the liberty of no one, least of all my own.”