3
Nevertheless, despite these disadvantages, I shall at once tell you what I hold to be right and just about these very matters. In my opinion it is your duty to treat with severity those who are proved to be aliens, who without having either won your consent or asked for it, have by stealth and violence come to participate in your religious rites and your common privileges, but to bring help and deliverance to those who have met with misfortune and can prove that they are citizens; for you should consider how pitiful above all others would be the plight of us whose rights have been denied, if, when we might properly sit with you as those exacting the penalty, we should be numbered with those who pay it, and should unjustly be condemned along with them because of the passion which the subject arouses.
4
I should have thought, men of the jury, that it was fitting for Eubulides, and for all those who are now making accusations in cases of disfranchisement, to state only things of which they have accurate knowledge and to bring forward no hearsay evidence in a trial of this sort. Such a procedure has from time immemorial been recognized as so clearly unjust that the laws do not admit the production of hearsay testimony even in the case of the most trifling charges; and with good reason; for when persons who claim to have sure knowledge have ere now been convicted of falsehood, how can it be right to give credence in matters regarding which even the speaker himself has no knowledge?
5
And when it is not permitted a man, even when he makes himself responsible, to harm another by evidence which he declares he has heard, how can it be right for you to give credence to one who speaks without responsibility? Since,then, this fellow, who knows the laws, and knows them all too well, has made his charges with injustice and with a view to selfish advantage, I must first tell you of the outrageous treatment which I received among my fellow-demesmen.
