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I have stewards and bailiffs on the farms who can take care of those.
How do you find a bailiff?
Do you search until you find someone with a natural turn for stewardship and then try to purchase him? For example, as when you want a carpenter.
First, you discover someone with a turn for carpentry. Then you do all you can to get possession of him. (4)
Or do you educate your bailiffs yourself? (4)
The latter.
I try to educate them myself. This is because he who fills my place and manages my affairs for me, my “alter ego,” (5) needs but to have my knowledge.
Granted the man is well disposed to you does it therefore follow, Ischomachus, that he is fit to be your bailiff?
It cannot have escaped your observation that albeit human beings, as a rule, are kindly disposed towards themselves, yet a large number of them will not apply the attention requisite to secure for themselves those good things which they fain would have.
What then?
Are we to regard these as the only people incapable of being taught this virtue of carefulness? or are there others in a like condition?
Surely we must include the slave to amorous affection. (11) Your woeful lover (12) is incapable of being taught attention to anything beyond one single object. (13)
No light task, I take it, to discover any hope or occupation sweeter to him than that which now employs him, his care for his beloved, nor, when the call for action comes, (14) will it be easy to invent worse punishment than that he now endures in separation from the object of his passion. (15) Accordingly, I am in no great hurry to appoint a person of this sort to manage (16) my affairs; the very attempt to do so I regard as futile.
Or, “where demands of business present themselves, and something must be done.” (15) Cf. Shakesp. “Sonnets,” passim. (16) Or, “I never dream of appointing as superintendent.”
Can a man devoid of carefulness himself to render others more careful? No more possible (he answered) than for a man who knows no music to make others musical.
If the teacher sets but an ill example, the pupil can hardly learn to do the thing aright. (19) And if the master’s conduct is suggestive of laxity, how hardly shall his followers attain to carefulness! Or to put the matter concisely, “like master like man.”
I do not think I ever knew or heard tell of a bad master blessed with good servants. The converse I certainly have seen ere now, a good master and bad servants; but they were the sufferers, not he.
No, he who would create a spirit of carefulness in others must have the skill himself to supervise the field of labour.
To test, examine, scrutinise.
He must be ready to requite where due the favour of a service well performed, nor hesitate to visit the penalty of their deserts upon those neglectful of their duty.
The answer of the barbarian to the king seems aposite.
You know the story, how the king had met with a good horse, but wished to give the creature flesh and that without delay, and so asked some one reputed to be clever about horses: “What will give him flesh most quickly?” To which the other: “The master’s eye.”
So, too, it strikes me, Socrates, there is nothing like “the master’s eye” to call forth latent qualities, and turn the same to beautiful and good effect.
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