the gens and tribe, he also tore the bond that had so 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[38] 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 to be the case. Gentes and tribes were everywhere
hopelessly intermingled, slaves, clients, and foreigners lived among
citizens. The capacity for settling down permanently which had only been
acquired near the end of the middle stage of barbarism, was time and
again sidetracked by the necessity of changing the abode according to
the dictates of commerce, different occupations and the transfer of
land. The members of the gentile organizations could no longer meet for
the purpose of taking care of their common interests. Only matters of
little importance, such as religious festivals, were still observed in
an indifferent way. Beside the wants and interests for the care of which
the gentile organs were appointed and fitted, new wants and inter