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Updated: June 9, 2025
It is I, Hannibal, who now solicit peace; who would neither ask for it unless I believed it expedient, nor will I fail to observe it for the same reason of expedience on account of which I have solicited it.
And by not taking that lofty line of duty which a Zeno or an Antisthenes would have taken, Seneca became more or less involved in some of the most dreadful events of Nero's reign. Every one of the terrible doubts under which his reputation has suffered arose from his having permitted the principle of expedience to supercede the laws of virtue. One or two of these events we must briefly narrate.
When Tillotson, or Berkeley, or Bishop Butler, or William Law, as well as Chubb and Tindal, spoke of happiness as the highest end, they meant something very different from 'the sleek and sordid epicurism, in which religion and a good conscience have their place among the means by which life is to be made more comfortable. William Law's definition of happiness as 'the satisfaction of all means, capacities, and necessities, the order and harmony of his being; in other words, the right state of a man, has not much in common with the motives of expedience urged by Bentham and Paley, utilitarian systems, truly spoken of as 'of the earth, earthy. But, in any case, even the highest conception of the expedient rests on a lower plane of principle than the humblest aspiration after the right.
This last is a pregnant question; for each generation will in all probability furnish its quota of the great books of the language, and, if so, a reform in the superstition we have exposed is no longer a matter of mere expedience, but of necessity.
He did not walk, he crawled. He began to listen with fury-sharpened ears. If he could get close to that huge rocket, close enough to detonate its solid fuel stores.... That would be at once revenge and expedience. If the rocket's fuel blew up instead of burning as intended, it would annihilate the camp. It would wipe out every living creature present.
And a fourth reason is here suggested for consulting the history of Protestant institutions, when I am going to speak of the object and nature of University Education. It will serve to remind you, Gentlemen, that I am concerned with questions, not simply of immutable truth, but of practice and expedience.
Not to put the question on the religious ground at all, I fully agree with Carlyle that, on the mere consideration of expedience and physical fact, nothing can be more fatal, more calamitous than `to burn away in mad waste the divine aromas and celestial elements from our existence; to change our holy of holies into a place of riot; to make the soul itself hard, impious, barren."
There was division among the Republican senators in regard to the expedience of this change. It was the judgment of the more conservative Republicans who followed Mr. Fessenden, that it was needless to risk a veto of an important bill of this character by confronting the President with a distinct negative of his own theory in a place where it practically availed nothing.
Ermine felt obliged to grant this at least, though she was as doubtful of her shy Rose's happiness as of the expedience of the intimacy; but there was no being ungracious to the gentle visitor, and no doubt Ermine felt rejoiced and elevated.
So this, after all, is this writer's idea of virtue! a something that is done for the sake of something else; a sort of expedience! He is honest, it seems, simply because honesty is "the best policy," and on that score it is that he thinks himself virtuous. Why, "for its own sake" enters into the very idea or definition of a virtue.
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