Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/120

 104- HISTORY OF GREECE. of government have been held together, or the misery of thj multitude alleviated. We are to consider, first, the great per- sonal cruelty of these preexisting 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 con- viction 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 enrich- ing, 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 coaviction that such contracts are advantageous to both parties as a class, and that to break up the confidence essential to their existence would pro- duce extensive mischief throughout all society. The man whose reverence for the obligation of a contract is now the most pro- found, 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 awaken- ed 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 cap-