"Any man who to secure your real interests opposes your wishes and never speaks to get applause but deliberately chooses politics as his profession (a business in which chance exercises greater influence than human reason), being perfectly ready to answer for the caprices is a really brave and useful citizen. I have never had recourse to the popular arts of winning favour; I have never used low abuse or stooped to humour you or made rich men's money public; I continue to tell you what is bound to make me unpopular among you and yet advance your strength if only you will listen-so unenviable is the counsellor's lot." A deep and splendid courage in hopelessness is here manifest. A little later in the same year was delivered the last and greatest of all the patriotic speeches, the _Third Philippic_. Early in the speech the whole object of the Macedonian threat is made apparent--the jugular veins of Athens, her trade-routes. "Any man who plots and intrigues to secure the means of my capture is at war with me, even if he has not fired a shot. In the last event, what are the danger-spots of Athens? The Hellespont, Megara and Euboea, the Peloponnese. Am I to say then that a man who has fired this train against Athens is at peace with her?" Then the plot against all Greek liberty is explained. "We all recognise the common danger, but we never send embassies to one another. We are in such a sorry plight, so great a gulf has been fixed between cities by intrigue that we are incapable of doing what is our duty and our interest; we cannot combine; we can make no confederation of mutual friendship and assistance; we stare at the man as he grows greater; each of us is determined to take advantage of the time during which another is being ruined, never considering or planning the salvation of Greece. Every one knows that Philip is like a recurring plague or a fit of some malevolent disease which attacks even those who seem to be out of his reach. Remember this; all the indignities put on Greece by Sparta or ourselves were at least the work of genuine sons of the land; they may be likened to the wild oats of some heir to a great estate--if they were the excesses of some slave or changeling we all would have considered them monstrous and scandalous. But that is not our attitude to Philip and his diplomacy, though he is not a Greek or a relation; rather he is not born even of decent barbarian parents--he is a cursed wretch from Macedonia which till recently could not supply even a respectable servant." The bitterness of this is intense in a man who generally refrains from anything undignified in a public speech. The cause of this disunion is bribery. In former times