been
instituted. And above all the young state needed its own fighting
forces. Among the seafaring Athenians this had to be at first only a
navy, for occasional short expeditions and the protection of the
merchant vessels. At some uncertain time before Solon, the naukrariai
were instituted, little territorial districts, twelve in each tribe.
Every naukraria had to furnish, equip and man a war vessel and to detail
two horsemen. This arrangement was a twofold attack on the gentile
constitution. In the first place it created 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 was first attempted by general measures, e.
g., th