Page:The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.djvu/144

138 a public power of coercion that did no longer absolutely coincide with the entirety of the armed nation. In the second place it was the first division of the people for public purposes, not by groups of kinship, but by local residence. We shall soon see what that signified.

As the gentile constitution could not come to the assistance of the exploited people, they could look only to the rising state. And the state brought help in the form of the constitution of Solon. At the same time it added to its own strength at the expense of the old constitution. Solon opened the series of so-called political revolutions by an infringement on private property. We pass over the means by which this reform was accomplished in the year 594 B.C. or thereabout. Ever since, all revolutions have been revolutions for the protection of one kind of property against another kind of property. They cannot protect one kind without violating another. In the great French revolution the feudal property was sacrificed for the sake of saving bourgeois property. In Solon's revolution, the property of the creditors had to make concessions to the property of the debtors. The debts were simply declared illegal. We are not acquainted with the accurate details, but Solon boasts in his poems that he removed the mortgage columns from the indented lots and enabled all who had fled or been sold abroad for debts to return home. This was only feasible by an open violation of private property. And indeed, all so-called political revolutions were started for the protection of one kind of property by the confiscation, also called theft, of another kind of property. It is absolutely true that for more than 2,500 years private property could only be protected by the violation of private property.

But now a way had to be found to avoid the return of such an enslavement of the free Athenians. This