[51]
Let no one understand me to say that the
money ought not to have been wrung from the defaulters. It ought; but how? Even
as the law enjoins, for the benefit of the other citizens. That is the spirit of
democracy. For what you, men of Athens, have gained by the exaction of such paltry sums of
money in this way, is nothing to what you have lost by the introduction of such
habits into political life. If you care to inquire why a man would sooner live
under a democracy than under an oligarchy, you will find that most obvious
reason is that in a democracy everything is more easy-going.
Demosthenes. Demosthenes with an English translation by A. T. Murray, Ph.D., LL.D. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1939.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.