In regard to the whole measure of the seisachtheia, indeed, though the poems of Solon were open to every one, ancient authors gave different statements, both of its purport and of its extent. Most of them construed it as having cancelled indiscriminately all money contracts; while Androtion, and others, thought that it did nothing more than lower the rate of interest and depreciate the currency to the extent of twenty-seven per cent., leaving the letter of the contracts unchanged. How Androtion came to maintain such an opinion we cannot easily understand, for the fragments now remaining from Solon seem distinctly to refute it, though, on the other hand, they do not go so far as to substantiate the full extent of the opposite view entertained by many writers,—that all money contracts indiscriminately were rescinded:[182] against which there is also a farther reason, that, if the fact had been so, Solon could have had no motive to debase the money standard. Such debasement supposes that there must have been some debtors, at least, whose contracts remained valid, and whom, nevertheless, he desired partially to assist. His poems distinctly mention three things: 1. The removal of the mortgage pillars. 2. The enfranchisement of the land. 3. The protection, liberation, and restoration of the persons of endangered or enslaved debtors. All these expressions point distinctly to the thêtes and small proprietors, whose sufferings and peril were the most urgent, and whose case required a remedy immediate as well as complete: we find that his repudiation of debts was carried far enough to exonerate them, but no farther.
It seems to have been the respect entertained for the character of Solon which partly occasioned these various misconceptions of his ordinances for the relief of debtors: Androtion in ancient, and some eminent critics in modern times, are anxious to make out that he gave relief without loss or injustice to any one. But this opinion is altogether inadmissible: the loss to creditors, by the wholesale abrogation of numerous prëexisting contracts, and by the partial depreciation of the coin, is a fact not to be disguised. The seisachtheia of Solon, unjust so far as it rescinded previous agreements, but highly salutary in its consequences, is to be vindicated by showing that in no other way could the bonds of government have been held together, or the misery of the multitude alleviated. We are to consider, first, the great personal cruelty of these preëxisting contracts, which condemned the body of the free debtor and his family to slavery; next, the profound detestation created by such a system in the large mass of the poor, against both the judges and the creditors by whom it had been enforced, which rendered their feelings unmanageable, so soon as they came together under the sentiment of a common danger, and with the determination to insure to each other mutual protection. Moreover, the law which vests a creditor with power over the person of his debtor, so as to convert him into a slave, is likely to give rise to a class of loans, which inspire nothing but abhorrence,—money lent with the foreknowledge that the borrower will be unable to repay it, but also in the conviction that the value of his person as a slave will make good the loss; thus reducing him to a condition of extreme misery, for the purpose sometimes of aggrandizing, sometimes of enriching, the lender. Now the foundation on which the respect for contracts rests, under a good law of debtor and creditor, is the very reverse of this; it rests on the firm conviction that such contracts are advantageous to both parties as a class, and that to break up the confidence essential to their existence would produce extensive mischief throughout all society. The man whose reverence for the obligation of a contract is now the most profound, would have entertained a very different sentiment if he had witnessed the dealings of lender and borrower at Athens, under the old ante-Solonian law. The oligarchy had tried their best to enforce this law of debtor and creditor, with its disastrous series of contracts, and the only reason why they consented to invoke the aid of Solon, was because they had lost the power of enforcing it any longer, in consequence of the newly awakened courage and combination of the people. That which they could not do for themselves, Solon could not have done for them, even had he been willing; nor had he in his possession the means either of exempting or compensating those creditors, who, separately taken, were open to no reproach; indeed, in following his proceedings, we see plainly that he thought compensation due, not to the creditors, but to the past sufferings of the enslaved debtors, since he redeemed several of them from foreign captivity, and brought them back to their home. It is certain that no measure, simply and exclusively prospective, would have sufficed for the emergency: there was an absolute necessity for overruling all that class of preëxisting rights which had produced so violent a social fever. While therefore, to this extent, the seisachtheia cannot be acquitted of injustice, we may confidently affirm that the injustice inflicted was an indispensable price, paid for the maintenance of the peace of society, and for the final abrogation of a disastrous system as regarded insolvents.[183] And the feeling as well as the legislation universal in the modern European world, by interdicting beforehand all contracts for selling a man’s person or that of his children into slavery, goes far to sanction practically the Solonian repudiation.
One thing is never to be forgotten in regard to this measure, combined with the concurrent amendments introduced by Solon in the law,—it settled finally the question to which it referred. Never again do we hear of the law of debtor and creditor as disturbing Athenian tranquillity. The general sentiment which grew up at Athens, under the Solonian money-law, and under the democratical government, was one of high respect for the sanctity of contracts. Not only was there never any demand in the Athenian democracy for new tables or a depreciation of the money standard, but a formal abnegation of any such projects was inserted in the solemn oath taken annually by the numerous diakasts, who formed the popular judicial body, called hêliæa, or the hêliastic jurors,—the same oath which pledged them to uphold the democratical constitution, also bound them to repudiate all proposals either for an abrogation of debts or for a redivision of the lands.[184] There can be little doubt that under the Solonian law, which enabled the creditor to seize the property of his debtor, but gave him no power over the person, the system of money-lending assumed a more beneficial character: the old noxious contracts, mere snares for the liberty of a poor freeman and his children, disappeared, and loans of money took their place, founded on the property and prospective earnings of the debtor, which were in the main useful to both parties, and therefore maintained their place in the moral sentiment of the public. And though Solon had found himself compelled to rescind all the mortgages on land subsisting in his time, we see money freely lent upon this same security, throughout the historical times of Athens, and the evidentiary mortgage pillars remaining ever after undisturbed.
In the sentiment of an early society, as in the old Roman law, a distinction is commonly made between the principal and the interest of a loan, though the creditors have sought to blend them indissolubly together. If the borrower cannot fulfil his promise to repay the principal, the public will regard him as having committed a wrong which he must make good by his person; but there is not the same unanimity as to his promise to pay interest: on the contrary, the very exaction of interest will be regarded by many in the same light in which the English law considers usurious interest, as tainting the whole transaction. But in the modern mind, principal, and interest within a limited rate, have so grown together, that we hardly understand how it can ever have been pronounced unworthy of an honorable citizen to lend money on interest; yet such is the declared opinion of Aristotle, and other superior men of antiquity; while the Roman Cato, the censor, went so far as to denounce the practice as a heinous crime.[185] It was comprehended by them among the worst of the tricks of trade,—and they held that all trade, or profit derived from interchange, was unnatural, as being made by one man at the expense of another: such pursuits, therefore, could not be commended, though they might be tolerated to a certain extent as matter of necessity, but they belonged essentially to an inferior order of citizens.[186] What is remarkable in Greece is, that the antipathy of a very early state of society against traders and money-lenders lasted longer among the philosophers than among the mass of the people,—it harmonized more with the social idéal of the former, than with the practical instincts of the latter.
In a rude condition, such as that of the ancient Germans described by Tacitus, loans on interest are unknown: habitually careless of the future, the Germans were gratified both in giving and receiving presents, but without any idea that they thereby either imposed or contracted an obligation.[187] To a people in this state of feeling, a loan on interest presents the repulsive idea of making profit out of the distress of the borrower; moreover, it is worthy of remark, that the first borrowers must have been for the most part men driven to this necessity by the pressure of want, and contracting debt as a desperate resource, without any fair prospect of ability to repay: debt and famine run together, in the mind of the poet Hesiod.[188] The borrower is, in this unhappy state, rather a distressed man soliciting aid, than a solvent man capable of making and fulfilling a contract; and if he cannot find a friend to make him a free gift in the former character, he will not, under the latter character, obtain a loan from a stranger, except by the promise of exorbitant interest,[189] and by the fullest eventual power over his person which he is in a condition to grant. In process of time a new class of borrowers rise up, who demand money for temporary convenience or profit, but with full prospect of repayment,—a relation of lender and borrower quite different from that of the earlier period, when it presented itself in the repulsive form of misery on the one side, set against the prospect of very large profit on the other. If the Germans of the time of Tacitus had looked to the condition of the poor debtors in Gaul, reduced to servitude under a rich creditor, and swelling by hundreds the crowd of his attendants, they would not have been disposed to regret their own ignorance of the practice of money-lending.[190] How much the interest of money was then regarded as an undue profit extorted from distress, is powerfully illustrated by the old Jewish law; the Jew being permitted to take interest from foreigners (whom the lawgiver did not think himself obliged to protect), but not from his own countrymen.[191] The Koran follows out this point of view consistently, and prohibits the taking of interest altogether. In most other nations, laws have been made to limit the rate of interest, and at Rome, especially, the legal rate was successively lowered,—though it seems, as might have been expected, that the restrictive ordinances were constantly eluded. All such restrictions have been intended for the protection of debtors; an effect which large experience proves them never to produce, unless it be called protection to render the obtaining of money on loan impracticable for the most distressed borrowers. But there was another effect which they did tend to produce,—they softened down the primitive antipathy against the practice generally, and confined the odious name of usury to loans lent above the fixed legal rate.
In this way alone could they operate beneficially, and their tendency to counterwork the previous feeling was at that time not unimportant, coinciding as it did with other tendencies arising out of the industrial progress of society, which gradually exhibited the relation of lender and borrower in a light more reciprocally beneficial, and less repugnant to the sympathies of the bystander.[192]
At Athens, the more favorable point of view prevailed throughout all the historical times,—the march of industry and commerce, under the mitigated law which prevailed subsequently to Solon, had been sufficient to bring it about at a very early period, and to suppress all public antipathy against lenders at interest.[193] We may remark, too, that this more equitable tone of opinion grew up spontaneously, without any legal restriction on the rate of interest,—no such restriction having ever been imposed, and the rate being expressly declared free by a law ascribed to Solon himself.[194] The same may probably be said of the communities of Greece generally,—at least there is no information to make us suppose the contrary. But the feeling against lending money at interest remained in the bosoms of the philosophical men long after it had ceased to form a part of the practical morality of the citizens, and long after it had ceased to be justified by the appearances of the case as at first it really had been. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero,[195] and Plutarch, treat the practice as a branch of that commercial and money-getting spirit which they are anxious to discourage; and one consequence of this was, that they were less disposed to contend strenuously for the inviolability of existing money-contracts. The conservative feeling on this point was stronger among the mass than among the philosophers. Plato even complains of it as inconveniently preponderant,[196] and as arresting the legislator in all comprehensive projects of reform. For the most part, indeed, schemes of cancelling debts and redividing lands were never thought of except by men of desperate and selfish ambition, who made them stepping-stones to despotic power. Such men were denounced alike by the practical sense of the community and by the speculative thinkers; but when we turn to the case of the Spartan king Agis the Third, who proposed a complete extinction of debts and an equal redivision of the landed property of the state, not with any selfish or personal views, but upon pure ideas of patriotism, well or ill understood, and for the purpose of renovating the lost ascendency of Sparta,—we find Plutarch[197] expressing the most unqualified admiration of this young king and his projects, and treating the opposition made to him as originating in no better feelings than meanness and cupidity. The philosophical thinkers on politics conceived—and to a great degree justly, as I shall show hereafter—that the conditions of security, in the ancient world, imposed upon the citizens generally the absolute necessity of keeping up a military spirit and willingness to brave at all times personal hardship and discomfort; so that increase of wealth, on account of the habits of self-indulgence which it commonly introduces, was regarded by them with more or less of disfavor. If in their estimation any Grecian community had become corrupt, they were willing to sanction great interference with preëxisting rights for the purpose of bringing it back nearer to their ideal standard: and the real security for the maintenance of these rights lay in the conservative feelings of the citizens generally, much more than in the opinions which superior minds imbibe from the philosophers.
Those conservative feelings were in the subsequent Athenian democracy peculiarly deep-rooted: the mass of the Athenian people identified inseparably the maintenance of property, in all its various shapes, with that of their laws and constitution. And it is a remarkable fact, that though the admiration entertained at Athens for Solon, was universal, the principle of his seisachtheia, and of his money-depreciation, was not only never imitated, but found the strongest tacit reprobation; whereas at Rome, as well as in most of the kingdoms of modern Europe, we know that one debasement of the coin succeeded another,—the temptation, of thus partially eluding the pressure of financial embarrassments, proved, after one successful trial, too strong to be resisted, and brought down the coin by successive depreciations from the full pound of twelve ounces to the standard of half an ounce. It is of some importance to take notice of this fact, when we reflect how much “Grecian faith” has been degraded by the Roman writers into a byword for duplicity in pecuniary dealings.[198] The democracy of Athens,—and, indeed, the cities of Greece generally, both oligarchies and democracies,—stands far above the senate of Rome, and far above the modern kingdoms of France and England, until comparatively recent times, in respect of honest dealing with the coinage:[199] moreover, while there occurred at Rome several political changes which brought about new tables,[200] or at least a partial depreciation of contracts, no phenomenon of the same kind ever happened at Athens, during the three centuries between Solon and the end of the free working of the democracy. Doubtless there were fraudulent debtors at Athens, and the administration of private law, though it did not in any way connive at their proceedings, was far too imperfect to repress them as effectually as might have been wished. But the public sentiment on the point was just and decided, and it may be asserted with confidence, that a loan of money at Athens was quite as secure as it ever was at any time or place of the ancient world,—in spite of the great and important superiority of Rome with respect to the accumulation of a body of authoritative legal precedent, the source of what was ultimately shaped into the Roman jurisprudence. Among the various causes of sedition or mischief in the Grecian communities,[201] we hear little of the pressure of private debt.
By the measures of relief above described,[202] Solon had accomplished results surpassing his own best hopes. He had healed the prevailing discontents; and such was the confidence and gratitude which he had inspired, that he was now called upon to draw up a constitution and laws for the better working of the government in future. His constitutional changes were great and valuable: respecting his laws, what we hear is rather curious than important.
It has been already stated that, down to the time of Solon, the classification received in Attica was that of the four Ionic tribes, comprising in one scale the phratries and gentes, and in another scale the three trittyes and forty-eight naukraries,—while the eupatridæ, seemingly a few specially respected gentes, and perhaps a few distinguished families in all the gentes, had in their hands all the powers of government. Solon introduced a new principle of classification, called, in Greek, the timocratic principle. He distributed all the citizens of the tribes, without any reference to their gentes or phratries, into four classes, according to the amount of their property, which he caused to be assessed and entered in a public schedule. Those whose annual income was equal to five hundred medimni of corn (about seven hundred imperial bushels) and upwards,—one medimnus being considered equivalent to one drachma in money,—he placed in the highest class; those who received between three hundred and five hundred medimni, or drachms, formed the second class; and those between two hundred and three hundred, the third.[203] The fourth and most numerous class comprised all those who did not possess land yielding a produce equal to two hundred medimni. The first class, called pentakosiomedimni, were alone eligible to the archonship and to all commands: the second were called the knights or horsemen of the state, as possessing enough to enable them to keep a horse and perform military service in that capacity: the third class, called the zeugitæ, formed the heavy-armed infantry, and were bound to serve, each with his full panoply. Each of these three classes was entered in the public schedule as possessed of a taxable capital, calculated with a certain reference to his annual income, but in a proportion diminishing according to the scale of that income,—and a man paid taxes to the state according to the sum for which he stood rated in the schedule; so that this direct taxation acted really like a graduated income-tax. The ratable property of the citizens belonging to the richest class, the pentakosiomedimnus, was calculated and entered on the state-schedule at a sum of capital equal to twelve times his annual income: that of the hippeus, or knight, at a sum equal to ten times his annual income: that of the zeugite, at a sum equal to five times his annual income. Thus a pentakosiomedimnus, whose income was exactly five hundred drachms, the minimum qualification of his class, stood rated in the schedule for a taxable property of six thousand drachms, or one talent, being twelve times his income,—if his annual income were one thousand drachms, he would stand rated for twelve thousand drachms, or two talents, being the same proportion of income to ratable capital. But when we pass to the second class, or knights, the proportion of the two is changed,—the knight possessing an income of just three hundred drachms, or three hundred medimni, would stand rated for three thousand drachms, or ten times his real income, and so in the same proportion for any income above three hundred and below five hundred. Again, in the third class. or below three hundred, the proportion is a second time altered,—the zeugite possessing exactly two hundred drachms of income, was rated upon a still lower calculation, at one thousand drachms, or a sum equal to five times his income; and all incomes of this class, between two hundred and three hundred drachms, would in like manner be multiplied by five in order to obtain the amount of ratable capital. Upon these respective sums of scheduled capital, all direct taxation was levied: if the state required one per cent, of direct tax, the poorest pentakosiomedimnus would pay (upon six thousand drachms) sixty drachms; the poorest hippeus would pay (upon three thousand drachms) thirty; the poorest zeugite would pay (upon one thousand drachms) ten drachms. And thus this mode of assessment would operate like a graduated income-tax, looking at it in reference to the three different classes,—but as an equal income-tax, looking at it in reference to the different individuals comprised in one and the same class.[204]