54
And this is not due to a single cause, Athenians, or you might easily remedy it, but to many errors of every kind throughout the past. Without enumerating these, I will mention one on which all the rest turn, only beseeching you not to be offended with me, if I speak the truth boldly. It is the selling of your interests at every opportunity; your share in the bargain is leisure and inaction, which charm you out of your resentment against your betrayers, but others reap the rewards.
55
The other errors it is not worth while to investigate now, but whenever any question arises that concerns Philip, instantly up jumps someone and says there must be no nonsense talked, no declarationtion of war, and he at once goes on to add how good a thing it is to preserve peace, and what a bother it is to keep up a large army, and how certain persons want to plunder your wealthi.e. by diverting money from the Theoric Fund to military objects.; and their other statements are as true as they can make them.
56
But surely it is not to you that they should recommend peace, for you have taken the advice and there you sit; it is to the man who is even now on the warpath; for if Philip can be won over, your share of the compact is ready to hand. Again, they should reflect that the irksome thing is not the expense of securing our safety, but the doom that will be ours if we shrink from that expense. As for the plunder of your wealth, they ought to prevent that by proposing some way of checking it and not by abandoning your interests.
57
And yet it is just this that rouses my indignation, that some of you should be distressed at the prospect of the plunder of your wealth, when you are quite competent to protect it and to punish any offender, but that you are not distressed at the sight of Philip thus plundering every Greek state in turn, the more so as he is plundering them to injure you.
