[90]
Could any
conceivable statute be more unsound or more opposed to your interests? First, it
enjoins the reversal of your judgements in cases long ago decided; and secondly,
in cases still to be tried, while instructing sworn jurors to inflict penalties,
it makes those penalties inoperative. Further, it enfranchises state-debtors who
do not discharge their liabilities, and, in general, it makes an exhibition of
you jurors as men whose oaths, whose penalties, whose verdicts, whose censures,
whose acts, in short, are all utterly futile. For my part, I conceive that if
the author of the statute had been Critias of the Thirty Tyrants, he would
hardly have framed and introduced it in any other fashion than this.
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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