Conservationists sometimes sound warnings about the threatened exhaustion of this or that American natural resource. But there is much evidence to show that the most serious erosion is in a nonmaterial asset, individual character.
Whether Cornelia, the Mother of the Gracchi, did present her children when she was asked to show her jewels, or whether this is a flight of Plutarch’s imagination, the story-points up an eternal truth. The decisive test of the quality of any society is the worth of the men and women who make it up.
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