United States or Cocos Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
For that matter, does not the aggregate of enjoyment of a score of cannibals outweigh the suffering of the one man whom they have sacrificed to their appetite, or the delirious excitement with which a brutal crowd witnesses a lynching overbalance the pain of their solitary victim? Yet our souls revolt against such things. We cry, ruat caelum, fiat justitia! Justice is prior to all expediency!
Caelum non animum mutant is only tolerably true. A derangement of stars is all the change you get by travelling everywhere the same golden-headed nails, as Hugo, hard-driven, called them, are sticking in the firmament. This particular moon was hanging, not over a church steeple, like De Musset's moon, Comme un point sur un i, but like the big yellow dial of the clock in a church tower.
"Caelum non animum" is a very old proverb: his first impulse, no doubt, was to change the scene, and seek under other skies an altered frame of mind, in defiance of Horace and his worldly wisdom, so rarely at fault. In these days a code of behaviour has been established by society to meet every eventuality of life.
Do they alter one hair's breadth for the better the characters of the ten thousand male and female noodles who travel forth to stare at them every year? Do mountains make them lofty-minded and generous-hearted? No. Caelum, non animum mutant, qui trans mare currunt. Don't talk to me of the moral and physical superiority of mountain races, for I tell you it is a dream.
Each must have resigned a practice very far exceeding perhaps doubling, or even trebling their present salaries of office. On this sore subject we shall not dwell, nor do we feel bound to offer any opinion of our own as to the alleged merits or demerits of the new Poor-Law; but it certainly looks as though Ministers had resolved to do what they believed to be right, ruat caelum.
Word Of The Day