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[56]
Why? Because in the defence of those for
whose sake we fight our enemies, to save them from indignity and licentiousness,
he permitted us to slay even our friends, if they insult them and defile them in
defiance of law. Men are not our friends and our foes by natural generation:
they are made such by their own actions; and the law gives us freedom to
chastise as enemies those whose acts are hostile. When there are so many
conditions that justify the slaying of anyone else, it is monstrous that that
man should be the only man in the world whom, even under those conditions, it is
to be unlawful to slay.
Demosthenes. Demosthenes with an English translation by A. T. Murray, Ph.D., LL.D. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1939.
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