[87]
“But if at
the time of the ninth presidency neither he nor his sureties shall have paid in
the money, the man who gave sureties shall be imprisoned, and the property of
the sureties shall be confiscated.” In this final clause, you will
find, he has at last become the accuser of his own iniquities in the fullest
sense. He did not forbid imprisonment on the broad ground that to imprison a
free citizen is something shameful or terrible; but he stole from you your
chance of catching your criminal in the place where he is, and so he left to
you, who are the party aggrieved, the empty name of retribution, but robbed you
of the reality. Without your consent he gave a discharge to people who forcibly
appropriate your money; and he was within an ace of adding a clause enabling an
action at law against the juries that had imposed the penalty of imprisonment.
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.