THE WORLD'S FAMOUS ORATIONS
have you availed yourself of their authority to take off so many of our citizens? Or whither shall we have recourse? to whom shall we intrust the detection of secret villainy? if you, notwithstanding all your affected regard to our popular government, are to dissolve this council, to whose protection our lives have been intrusted; to whose protection our liberty and our constitution have oftentimes been intrusted; by whose protection that person of thine hath been preserved (for, as you pretend, it hath frequently been attempted) to utter these calumnies against them; to whose care we have committed our secret archives, on which the very being of cur state depends.
Has then Greece but slight, but common injuries to urge against Demosthenes and his sordid avarice? Hath the man so highly criminal the least pretense to mercy? Do not his late and former offenses call for the severest punishment? The world will hear the sentence you are this day to pronounce. The eyes of all men are fixed on you, impatient to learn the fate of so notorious a delinquent. You are they who, for crimes infinitely less heinous than his, have heavily and inexorably inflicted punishments on many. Menon was by you condemned to death for having
in the man's life, so far as we know it, enjoys our respect or esteem; his position must, at least, be broadly distinguished from that of such a man as Æschines, an Athenian citizen, who, while his city could still be served, abetted its enemies; or, from that of such a hireling as Demades. In the Harpalus affair Demosthenes was, beyond all reasonable doubt, innocent, and so probably were others of the accused."
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