It is not gain that I try to get from a benefit, nor pleasure, nor glory; content with giving pleasure to one human being, I shall give with the single purpose of doing what I ought. But I am not without choice in doing what I ought. Do you ask what the nature of this choice will be I shall choose a man who is upright, sincere, mindful, grateful, keeps his hands from another man’s property, who is not greedily attached to his own, who is kind to others; although Fortune may bestow upon him nothing with which be may repay my favor, I shall have accomplished my purpose when I have made choice of such a man. If I am made liberal by self-interest and mean calculation, if my only purpose in doing a service to a man is to have him in turn do a service to me, I shall not give a benefit to one who is setting out for distant and foreign countries, never to return; I shall not give to one who is so ill that he has no hope of recovery; I shall not give when my own health is failing, for I shall have no time to receive a return. And yet, that you may know that generous action is something desirable in itself, the foreigner who has just put into our harbor, and will straightway depart, receives our assistance; to a shipwrecked stranger, in order that he may sail back home, we both give a ship and equip it. He leaves us scarcely knowing who was the author of his salvation, and, expecting never more to see our faces again, he deputes the gods to be our debtors, and prays that they may repay the favor in his stead; meanwhile we rejoice in the consciousness of having given a benefit that will yield no fruit. And tell me, when we have reached the very end of life, and are drawing up our will, do we not dispense benefits that will yield us nothing? How much time is spent, how long do we debate with ourselves to whom and how much we shall give! For what difference does it make to whom we give since no one will make us any return? Yet never are we more careful in our giving, never do we wrestle more in making decisions than when, with all self-interest banished, only the ideal of good remains before our eyes; we are bad judges of our duties only so long as they are distorted by hope and fear and that most slothful of vices, pleasure. But when death has shut off all these, and has brought us to pronounce sentence as incorrupt judges, we search for those who are most worthy to inherit our possessions, and there is nothing that we arrange with more scrupulous care than this which is of no concern to ourselves. Yet, heavens! the great joy that comes to us as we think: “Through me this man will become richer, and I, by increasing his wealth, shall add new luster to his high position.” If we give only when we may expect some return, we ought to die intestate!