is to be vindicated by showing that in no other way could
the bonds of government have been held together, or the misery of the
multitude alleviated. We are to consider, first, the great personal
cruelty of these preexisting contracts, which condemned the body of the
free debtor and his family to slavery; next, the profound detestation
created by such a system in the large mass of the poor, against both the
judges and the creditors by whom it had been enforced, which rendered
their feelings unmanageable so soon as they came together under the
sentiment of a common danger and with the determination to insure to
each other mutual protection. Moreover, the law which vests a creditor
with power over the person of his debtor so as to convert him into a
slave, is likely to give rise to a class of loans which inspire nothing
but abhorrence--money lent with the foreknowledge that the borrower will
be unable to repay it, but also in the conviction that the value of his
person as a slave will make good the loss; thus reducing him to a
condition of extreme misery, for the purpose sometimes of aggrandizing,
sometimes of enriching, the lender. Now the foundation on which the
respect for contracts rests, under a good law of debtor and creditor, is
the very reverse of this. It rests on the firm conviction that such
contracts are advantageous to both parties as a class, and that to break
up the confidence essential to their existence would produce extensive
mischief throughout all society. The man whose reverence for the
obligation of a contract is now the most profound, would have
entertained a very different sentiment if he had witnessed the dealings
of lender and borrower at Athens under the old ante-Solonian law. The
oligarchy had tried their best to enforce this law of debtor and
creditor with its disastrous series of contracts, and the only reason
why they consented to invoke the aid of Solon was because they had lost
the power of enforcing it any longer, in consequence of the newly
awakened courage and combination of the people. That which they could
not do for themselves, Solon could not have done for them, even had he
been willing. Nor had he in his position the means either of exempting
or compensating those creditors who, separately taken, were open to no
reproach; indeed, in following his proceedings, we see plainly that he
thought compensation due, not to the creditors, but to the past
sufferings of the enslaved debtor, sin