Page:The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.djvu/209

203 long tied him indissolubly to the soil. What that meant was impressed on him by the money invented simultaneously with the advent of private property in land. The soil could now become a commodity to be bought and sold. Hardly had private ownership of land been introduced, when the mortgage put in its appearance (see Athens). As hetaerism and prostitution clung to the heels of monogamy, so does from now on the mortgage to private ownership in land. You have clamored for free, full, saleable land. Well, then, there you have it—tu l'as voulu, Georges Dandin; it was your own wish, George Dandin.

Industrial expansion, money, usury, private land, and mortgage thus progressed with the concentration and centralization of wealth in the hands of a small class, accompanied by the increasing impoverishment of the masses and the increasing mass of paupers. The new aristocracy of wealth, so far as it did not coincide with the old tribal nobility, forced the latter permanently into the background (in Athens, in Rome, among the Germans). And this division of free men into classes according to their wealth was accompanied, especially in Greece, by an enormous increase in the number of slaves whose forced labor formed the basis on which the whole superstructure of society was reared.

Let us now see what became of the gentile constitution through this revolution of society. Gentilism stood powerless in the face of the new elements that had grown without its assistance. It was dependent on the condition that the members of a gens, or of a tribe, should live together in the same territory and be its exclusive inhabitants. That had long ceased