[24]
Is it not an
absurd situation that you should by legislating express your anger against the
criminals, but, when you have caught any of them red-handed, should proceed to
let them go unscathed? That the lawgiver, a single individual, should on your
behalf incur the hostility of all the worthless, but that you yourselves,
collected together to defend your own interests, should not even display your
hatred of the wicked, but should be overpowered by the wickedness of a single
individual? That you should have fixed death as the penalty if anyone cites a
law which does not exist, and yet should allow men to escape unpunished who
reduce the existing laws to the level of laws which do not exist?
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.