when instead of mortgaging he prescribed the immediate transfer of
the property to the creditor with a view to prevent insolvency and to
devolve the burdens of the state on the real holders of the soil,(3)
was evaded by the rigorous system of personal credit, which might
be very suitable for merchants, but ruined the farmers. The free
divisibility of the soil always involved the risk of an insolvent
agricultural proletariate; and under such circumstances, when all
burdens were increasing and all means of deliverance were foreclosed,
distress and despair could not but spread with fearful rapidity among
the agricultural middle class.

Relations of the Social Question to the Question between Orders

The distinction between rich and poor, which arose out of these
relations, by no means coincided with that between the clans and the
plebeians. If far the greater part of the patricians were wealthy
landholders, opulent and considerable families were, of course,
not wanting among the plebeians; and as the senate, which even then
perhaps consisted in greater part of plebeians, had assumed the
superintendence of the finances to the exclusion even of the patrician
magistrates, it was natural that all those economic advantages, for
which the political privileges of the nobility were abused, should go
to the benefit of the wealthy collectively; and the pressure fell the
more heavily upon the commons, since those who were the ablest and
the most capable of resistance were by their admission to the senate
transferred from the class of the oppressed to the ranks of
the oppressors.

But this state of things prevented the political position of the
aristocracy from being permanently tenable. Had it possessed the