Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 1.djvu/300

 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