Our Debt to Rome, Greece, and Judea 199
pline, and Marcus Curtius hit the nail on the head, when
he plunged into the great abyss, with the words: “Rome
possesses nothing more precious than her citizens”. What
then the Roman preeminently stood for is pithily summed
up in the celebrated sentence: Fiat Justitia ruat coelum.
Let Justice be executed though the Heavens be crushed
into fragments. For the Romans realized that the State’s
welfare rests primarily upon Justice. Do you think we
need to be infused with the Roman spirit? Is there any
occasion for us, a free people, to respect authority and law,
order and discipline? There is. And unless we make up
our minds to the necessity we shall decline. I know full well
that many of us do not believe in discipline. We wish to
go our own way, in our own way, for we are impatient of
authority. But that is the attitude of mind which produces
Leopolds and Loebs and Dorothy Ellingsons. Lack of dis-
cipline it is which makes us break our word, scamp our work,
ignore our appointments and prevaricate about our wares,
for it implies an absolute indifference towards the feelings
of our fellowmen who exist for us only to carry out our own
whims. To check such an abomination we need reverence
for law and order, respect for authority, a faith in discipline,
loyalty to our constitution, more than anything else.
ɪ don’t believe in the unwritten law. If it is a man’s
duty to kill another man whom he finds breaking up his
home, let us not be ashamed to say so and put it in our
statute book. If it is lawful for a man to shoot another
man because he sees him reaching in his pocket perchance
for a handkerchief to blow his nose, then let us be honest
enough to say so and not skulk behind a hedge, which we
call self-defense.
Present conditions are anarchical, and one day there will
be a terrible upheaval if law is honored more in the breach