[123]
Another
remark worth making, gentlemen of the jury, is that you are far more magnanimous
than the politicians. Anyhow you do not repeal the harsh enactments made against
the common people,—against those, for instance, who take fees from
both parties, or attend the Assembly or sit on a jury while in debt to the
treasury, or do anything else forbidden by the laws,—although you know
that any man who commits one of these offences may do so because he is poor. You
do not enact laws to give liberty of transgression, but rather to take it away.
They, on the other hand, make laws to rescue from punishment persons guilty of
the most infamous and outrageous misconduct.
Demosthenes. Demosthenes with an English translation by A. T. Murray, Ph.D., LL.D. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1939.
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