In a sense this was in itself a species of pride or even vanity. He had his share of both. In what great human action is there no admixture of vanity? Is there, or has there ever been, a man who, when doing the most unselfish, self-denying, humble work of charity, has not some far-hidden and scarcely conscious sense of behaving rather better than some others would have done? Has there ever been anyone who would devote his whole existence to alleviate the sufferings of others if he were quite certain that no one would ever know what he had done, and that he would never get any possible reward, of any sort, for doing it? We are not defending him in all he did. We only seek impartially to analyze the feelings which had moved him in the past, and were now again to do so, and to rescue his memory from the injustice that has been done him by those who imagine him to have been a mere voluptuary, and who, not able to understand his character, mistake his apparent carelessness for flippancy, and are led away by contemporary writers whose personal hostility to him has made them seek to depreciate, and even to distort, where they cannot deny, the heroic actions which they are forced to admit. Against his natural inclinations and sympathies he had adopted the side of the populace at Athens. Having chosen it, he fought repeatedly for them, and would have gone on fighting for them, had they been true to him, as he would have served his country’s cause for ever if it had let him. He had advised a war against a power which was domineering over smaller states and cities allied with his country in Sicily. If he had been allowed to finish the war which he had strongly advised and prosperously begun, it would, as far as we can see, have redounded to the honour and glory of his country. He had given his whole energy to the conduct of the war; he was, he believed, about to bring it, in spite of the difficulties in his way, to a successful end. He was recalled while striving for this object, and doomed, without a spark of evidence worthy of a sane man’s belief, upon a silly, trumped-up tale, to die a shameful, a malefactor’s death. He knew he had been cursed by an interested hierarchy. He knew a stone had been set up in Athens recording his sentence and disgrace. The thought of that stone lie was never absent from his mind through all the weary time he lived at Sparta. Thenceforward, while that stone stood there, there never passed a day without a renewal of his vow that it should be cast down by the will and deed of those who had set it up, that the same voices which had ordered the lie to be engraved upon it should order its obliteration, and that the tongues which cursed him should recall their curse. Any other life but one devoted to this end and object would have appeared to him a life of cowardice. He declined to live in that condition.