For as for the
 trial for treason, which, when you accuse me, you say has been put an end to by me, that is a
 charge against me; and not against Rabirius. And I wish, O Romans, that I was the first or the
 only person, who had abolished that in this republic. I wish that that, which he brings forward
 as a charge against me, might be an evidence of my peculiar glory. For what can be desired by
 any one which I should prefer to being said in my consulship to have banished the executioner
 from the forum, and the gallows from the Campus? But that credit belongs, in the first instance,
 O Romans, to our ancestors, who, after the kings had been expelled, did not choose to retain any
 vestige of kingly cruelty among a free people; and in the second instance, to many gallant men,
 who thought it fit that your liberty should not be an unpopular thing from the severity of the
 punishments with which it was protected but that it should be defended by the lenity of the
 laws. Which, then, of us, O Labienus, is attached to the best interests of the people? you who think
 that an executioner and chains ought to be put in operation against Roman citizens in the very
 assembly of the people; who order a gallows to be planted and erected for the execution of
 citizens in the Campus Martius , in the comitia centuriata in a place hallowed by the auspices, or I, who
 forbid the assembly to be polluted by the contagion of an executioner who think that the forum
 of the Roman people ought to be purified from all such traces of nefarious wickedness who urge
 that the assembly ought to be kept pure, the campus holy, the person of every Roman citizen
 inviolate, and the rights of liberty unimpaired? Of a truth,
 the tribune of the people is very much devoted to the interests of the people,—is a guardian and
 defender of its privileges and liberties! The Porcian law forbade a rod to be laid on the person
 of any Roman citizen. This merciful man has brought back the scourge. The Porcian law protected
 the freedom of the citizens against the lictor. Labienus, that friend of the people, has handed
 them over to the executioner. Caius Gracchus passed a law that no trial should take place
 affecting the life of a Roman citizen without your orders. This friend of the people has
 compelled the duumvirs (without any order of yours being issued on the subject) not only to try
 a Roman citizen, but to condemn a Roman citizen to death without hearing him in his own defence.