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[2]
As for yourselves, I give you this
advice: do not be guilty of self-ruin and think it enough if you punish these men when you
see fit; but, while holding them in check so far as lies in your power, you must
yourselves, as becomes men deliberating on behalf of the State, put aside your own private
feuds and aim at what is most to the common good, reflecting that the punishment of no
individual, nor even of all the politicians in a body, can square the account if once the
laws should be destroyed on which your very life depends.1
1 Or, less probably, “the laws of which you are in charge.”
Demosthenes with an English translation by Norman W. DeWitt, Ph.D., and Norman J. DeWitt, Ph.D. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1949.
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