r
countrymen to make a timely provision for their future security, you
spread the alarm through all the neighbouring states, you combined the
most powerful in a confederacy with Athens, you carried the war out of
Attica, which (let Phocion say what he will) was safer than meeting it
there, you brought it, after all that had been done by the enemy to
strengthen himself and weaken us, after the loss of Amphipolis, Olynthus,
and Potidaea, the outguards of Athens, you brought it, I say, to the
decision of a battle with equal forces. When this could be effected
there was evidently nothing so desperate in our circumstances as to
justify an inaction which might probably make them worse, but could not
make them better. Phocion thinks that a state which cannot itself be the
strongest should live in friendship with that power which is the
strongest. But in my opinion such friendship is no better than
servitude. It is more advisable to endeavour to supply what is wanting
in our own strength by a conjunction with others who are equally in
danger. This method of preventing the ruin of our country was tried by
Demosthenes. Nor yet did he neglect, by all practicable means, to
augment at the same time our internal resources. I have heard that when
he found the Public Treasure exhausted he replenished it, with very great
peril to himself, by bringing into it money appropriated before to the
entertainment of the people, against the express prohibition of a popular
law, which made it death to propose the application thereof to any other
use. This was virtue, this was true and genuine patriotism. He owed all
his importance and power in the State to the favour of the people; yet,
in order to serve the State, he did not fear, at the evident hazard of
his life, to offend their darling passion and appeal against it to their
reason.

_Phocion_.--For this action I praise him. It was, indeed, far more
dangerous for a minister at Athens to violate that absurd and extravagant
law than any of those of Solon. But though he restored our finances, he
could not restore our lost virtue; he could not give that firm health,
that vigour to the State, which is the result of pure morals, of strict
order and civil discipline, of integrity in the old, and obedience in the
young. I therefore dreaded a conflict with the solid strength of
Macedon, where corruption had yet made but a very small progress, and was
happy that Demosthenes did not oblige me,