| Cultivation of the Right...: |
However, if models and measures are abolished and private appraisal is favoured, then bad ministers will let their standards be influenced by money, in order to obtain emoluments, and officials of the various ranks will, in a stealthy and hidden manner, make extortions from the people. The saying runs: 'Many woodworms and the wood snaps, a large fissure and the wall collapses.' So if ministers of state vie with one another in selfishness and do not heed the people, then inferiors are estranged from superiors. When this happens, there is a fissure in the state. If the officials of the various ranks make extortions from the people, stealthily and in a hidden manner, they are for the people like woodworms. Therefore is it exceptional in the world that where there are fissures and woodworms, ruin does not follow. That is why intelligent kings placed reliance on the law and removed self-interest, so that the state should have no fissures and no woodworms. |
