o join me without hesitation.

"Some of you may hang back because they have private enemies, and fear
that I may put the city into the hands of a party: none need be more
tranquil than they. I am not come here to help this party or that; and I
do not consider that I should be bringing you freedom in any real sense,
if I should disregard your constitution, and enslave the many to the few
or the few to the many. This would be heavier than a foreign yoke; and
we Lacedaemonians, instead of being thanked for our pains, should get
neither honour nor glory, but, contrariwise, reproaches. The charges
which strengthen our hands in the war against the Athenians would on
our own showing be merited by ourselves, and more hateful in us than in
those who make no pretensions to honesty; as it is more disgraceful for
persons of character to take what they covet by fair-seeming fraud than
by open force; the one aggression having for its justification the might
which fortune gives, the other being simply a piece of clever roguery.
A matter which concerns us thus nearly we naturally look to most
jealously; and over and above the oaths that I have mentioned, what
stronger assurance can you have, when you see that our words, compared
with the actual facts, produce the necessary conviction that it is our
interest to act as we say?

"If to these considerations of mine you put in the plea of inability,
and claim that your friendly feeling should save you from being hurt by
your refusal; if you say that freedom, in your opinion, is not without
its dangers, and that it is right to offer it to those who can accept
it, but not to force it on any against their will, then I shall take the
gods and heroes of your country to witness that I came for your good and
was rejected, and shall do my best to compel you by laying waste your
land. I shall do so without scruple, being justified by the necessity
which constrains me, first, to prevent the Lacedaemonians from being
damaged by you, their friends, in the event of your nonadhesion, through
the moneys that you pay to the Athenians; and secondly, to prevent the
Hellenes from being hindered by you in shaking off their servitude.
Otherwise indeed we should have no right to act as we propose; except
in the name of some public interest, what call should we Lacedaemonians
have to free those who do not wish it? Empire we do not aspire to: it
is what we are labouring to put down; and we should wrong the greater