over and warrant so sweeping a measure as the old _seisachtheia_ of
Solon, voiding all contracts in which the debtor had pledged his land
or his person; or such measures as the agrarian laws of Licinius and
the Gracchi? Or is it to go no further than to condemn such a law as
that which in England gives unwilled lands to the eldest son? We can
only criticise accurately a general idea of this sort in connection
with specific projects in which it is applied. As it stands, it is no
more than the expression of what the author thinks a wise principle of
public policy. It assumes the existence of property just as completely
as the theory of the most rigorous capitalist could do; it gives no
encouragement, as the Discourse did, to the notion of an equality in
being without property. There is no element of communism in a
principle so stated, but it suggests a social idea, based on the moral
claim of men to have equality of opportunity. This ideal stamped
itself on the minds of Robespierre and the other revolutionary
leaders, and led to practical results in the sale of the Church and
other lands in small lots, so as to give the peasant a market to buy
in. The effect of the economic change thus introduced happened to work
in the direction in which Rousseau pointed, for it is now known that
the most remarkable and most permanent of the consequences of the
revolution in the ownership of land was the erection, between the two
extreme classes of proprietors, of an immense body of middle-class
freeholders. This state is not equality, but gradation, and there is
undoubtedly an immense difference between the two. Still its origin is
an illustration on the largest scale in history of the force of
legislation being exerted to counteract an irregularity that had
become unbearable.[178]

Notwithstanding the disappearance of the more extravagant elements of
the old thesis, the new speculation was far from being purged of the
fundamental errors that had given such popularity to its predecessors.
"If the sea," he says in one place, "bathes nothing but inaccessible
rocks on your coasts, remain barbarous ichthyophagi; you will live all
the more tranquilly for it, better perhaps, and assuredly more
happily."[179] Apart from an outburst like this, the central idea
remained the same, though it was approached from another side and with
different objects. The picture of a state of nature had lost none of
its perilous attraction, though it was hung in