reigners from any opportunity of learning or observing,
although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality;
trusting less in system and policy than to the native spirit of our
citizens; while in education, where our rivals from their very cradles
by a painful discipline seek after manliness, at Athens we live exactly
as we please, and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate
danger. In proof of this it may be noticed that the Lacedaemonians
do not invade our country alone, but bring with them all their
confederates; while we Athenians advance unsupported into the territory
of a neighbour, and fighting upon a foreign soil usually vanquish with
ease men who are defending their homes. Our united force was never
yet encountered by any enemy, because we have at once to attend to our
marine and to dispatch our citizens by land upon a hundred different
services; so that, wherever they engage with some such fraction of our
strength, a success against a detachment is magnified into a victory
over the nation, and a defeat into a reverse suffered at the hands of
our entire people. And yet if with habits not of labour but of ease,
and courage not of art but of nature, we are still willing to encounter
danger, we have the double advantage of escaping the experience of
hardships in anticipation and of facing them in the hour of need as
fearlessly as those who are never free from them.

"Nor are these the only points in which our city is worthy of
admiration. We cultivate refinement without extravagance and knowledge
without effeminacy; wealth we employ more for use than for show, and
place the real disgrace of poverty not in owning to the fact but
in declining the struggle against it. Our public men have, besides
politics, their private affairs to attend to, and our ordinary citizens,
though occupied with the pursuits of industry, are still fair judges of
public matters; for, unlike any other nation, regarding him who takes no
part in these duties not as unambitious but as useless, we Athenians
are able to judge at all events if we cannot originate, and, instead
of looking on discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we
think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all. Again,
in our enterprises we present the singular spectacle of daring and
deliberation, each carried to its highest point, and both united in
the same persons; although usually decision is the fruit of ignorance