99
What are we to do for the first eight ? Tell us this, Timocrates: are we never to meet and deliberate? If so, shall we still be living under popular government? Shall there be no sessions of the courts, civil or criminal? If so, what security will there be for complainants? Shall the Council not attend at their office to transact their legal business? If so, what remains but complete disorganization? You nay reply that we shall go on without payment of fees. Then is it not monstrous that the Assembly, the Council, and the law-courts must go unpaid for the sake of a statute which you were paid to introduce?
100
You ought at least to have added a clause, as you did in dealing with the tax-farmers and their sureties, that if in any other statute or decree it is provided that the debts of any defaulter may be recovered as in the case of tax-farmers, recovery from such defaulters shall be effected in accordance with the existing laws.
101
—But in fact he went out of his way to avoid the statutes of tax-farming; and, because Euctemon’s decree did authorize recovery from losers of suits according to those statutes, for that very reason he omitted to add the clause. In that manner, by cancelling the existing punishment of public defaulters without substituting any other, he makes havoc of all our business,—the Assembly, the cavalry, the Council, the sacred funds, the civil revenue. And for that offence, men of Athens, if you are wise men, he will be chastised and treated as he deserves, and so made an example to deter others from bringing in such laws.
102
Not only, then, does he deprive the court of authority in respect of supplementary payments, offer immunity to defrauders of the State, cripple our national service, and undermine our financial system, but also, by abrogating the penalties imposed by the existing statutes, he has enacted his law for the benefit of swindlers, parricides, and shirkers.
