The same paper lists, briefly and not without mockery, the things usually recited in Sunday speeches: that nearly half of all who work for wages labour in small and middling firms; that a great part of what is produced is made there; that these same firms pay the towns their chief revenues and feed the public chests from which the sick and the old are provided for. I do not deny this; on the contrary, I gladly grant it; but all the more gravely do I ask why citizens so useful should prefer to leave their home.

Nor will I hide what a careful judge would notice at once. The paper produces no accounts, no figure, no inquiry of the bank; it does not say how great a share of money leaves, for what lands, for what trades, or whether it grows or shrinks. A prosecutor who pleads without accounts I have myself often refuted in the courts, and I order the books produced before sentence is passed. But if the matter stands so, and a bank that is public does not lightly accuse its own magistrates, the case is too grave to be passed over in silence.

I remember, Conscript Fathers, how, when Mithridates seized Asia, credit collapsed in the Forum at Rome, because many had lost the money they had placed in Asia; for the reckoning of money in the Forum is so bound up with that in the provinces that the one cannot stand without the other. I remember too my consulship, when desperate men were clamouring for new account books and creditors were hiding their money; credit was restored not by edicts nor by threats, but because I steadily refused to let the Republic break faith. "For nothing holds a state together more powerfully than good faith."

Money, believe me, is like a client: it seeks a patron who will defend it, not one who will praise it in a public meeting. What causes are driving this money abroad the paper does not say, and what I do not know I will not assert. Yet I ask, as a senator should: are the laws changed from day to day, so that no one knows what he will be allowed a year from now? Are the burdens so increased that the man who builds at home looks a fool? Do the magistrates praise the firms while grinding them down with taxes, costs and regulations? Whatever they answer, this much is certain: money, which has no vote in the assembly, votes with its feet, and no speech can annul that vote.

For among us, Conscript Fathers, eulogies are spoken over the dead. When a man speaks of a living citizen as though of a dead one, I fear he is already arranging the funeral. For he who governs the state governs not for himself but for those entrusted to him: "For the administration of the state, like a guardianship, must be conducted for the benefit of those entrusted to it, not of those to whom it is entrusted." But the man who seeks glory for himself in the name of those he meanwhile abandons is no guardian; he is a robber dressed in fine words.

What, then, do I propose? No edict to keep money at home; our own senate often forbade, in my consulship too, the export of gold, and in vain, for gold does not listen to decrees. I propose rather that the German senate examine the public bank's accounts openly, seek the causes of this flight, make the laws stable, lighten the burdens, and in short restore good faith, which alone keeps citizens and their money at home. If they do this, they will need no eulogies; if they do not, the eulogies will be funeral ones. The man who praises the backbone and adds to the load is no patron; he is a customs-collector.