191
Because they put down those who ruled unlawfully, for this cause the poet says they were honored. For then it was still in the ears of all men that the democracy was overthrown only after certain men had put out of the way the provision for the indictment of men who propose illegal measures. Yes, as I have heard my own father say,The form of the paragraph is lively and ungrammatical. (Simcox.) for he lived to be ninety-five years old, and had shared all the toils of the city, which he often described to me in his leisure hours—well, he said that in the early days of the re-established democracy, if any indictment for an illegal motion came into court, the word was as good as the deed.Punish him was no sooner said than done. For what is more wicked than the man who speaks and does what is unlawful?
192
And in those days, so my father said, they gave no such hearing as is given now, but the jurors were far more severe toward the authors of illegal motions than was the accuser himself; and it frequently happened that they made the clerk stop, and told him to read to them the laws and the motion a second time; and they convicted a man of making an illegal motion, not in case he had overleaped all the laws together, but if one syllable only was contravened. But the process as it is conducted nowadays is ridiculous. The clerk reads the statement of the illegality which is charged, and the jurors, as though hearing an incantation, or some matter which is no concern of theirs, are attending to something else.
