Unfortunately for the accused, this was exactly the wrong statement at the wrong moment. Ever since the Peloponnesian war there had been a bitter struggle in Athens between the rich and the poor, between capital and labor. Socrates was a “moderate”—a liberal who saw good and evil in both systems of government and who tried to find a compromise which should satisfy all reasonable people. This, of course, had made him thoroughly unpopular with both sides but thus far they had been too evenly balanced to take action against him. When at last in the year 403 B.C. the one-hundred-percent Democrats gained complete control of the state and expelled the aristocrats, Socrates was a doomed man. His friends knew this. They suggested that he leave the city before it was too late and this would have been a very wise thing to do. For Socrates had quite as many enemies as friends. During the greater part of a century he had been a sort of vocal “columnist,” a terribly clever busy-body who had made it his hobby to expose the shams and the intellectual swindles of those who regarded themselves as the pillars of Athenian society. As a result, every one had come to know him. His name had become a household word throughout eastern Greece. When he said something funny in the morning, by night the whole town had heard about it. Plays had been written about him and when he was finally arrested and taken to prison there was not a citizen in the whole of Attica who was not thoroughly familiar with all the details of his career. Those who took the leading part in the actual trial (like that honorable grain merchant who could neither read nor write but who knew all about the will of the Gods and therefore was loudest in his accusations) were undoubtedly convinced that they were rendering a great service to the community by ridding the city of a highly dangerous member of the so-called “intelligentsia,” a man whose teaching could only lead to laziness and crime and discontent among the slaves. It is rather amusing to remember that even under those circumstances, Socrates pleaded his case with such tremendous virtuosity that a majority of the jury was all for letting him go free and suggested that he might be pardoned if only he would give up this terrible habit of arguing, of debating, of wrangling and moralizing, in short, if only he would leave his neighbors and their pet prejudices in peace and not bother them with his eternal doubts. But Socrates would not hear of it. “By no means,” he exclaimed. “As long as my conscience, as long as the still small voice within me, bids me go forth and show men the true road to reason, I shall continue to buttonhole whomsoever I happen to meet and I shall say what is on my mind, regardless of consequences.” After that, there was no other course but to condemn the prisoner to death.