coinciding as it did with other tendencies arising out of the industrial
progress of society, which gradually exhibited the relation of lender
and borrower in a light more reciprocal, beneficial, and less repugnant
to the sympathies of the bystander.

At Athens the more favorable point of view prevailed throughout all the
historical times. The march of industry and commerce, under the
mitigated law which prevailed subsequently to Solon, had been sufficient
to bring it about at a very early period and to suppress all public
antipathy against lenders at interest. We may remark, too, that this
more equitable tone of opinion grew up spontaneously, without any legal
restriction on the rate of interest--no such restriction having ever
been imposed and the rate being expressly declared free by a law
ascribed to Solon himself. The same may probably be said of the
communities of Greece generally--at least there is no information to
make us suppose the contrary. But the feeling against lending money at
interest remained in the bosoms of the philosophical men long after it
had ceased to form a part of the practical morality of the citizens, and
long after it had ceased to be justified by the appearances of the case
as at first it really had been. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Plutarch,
treat the practice as a branch of the commercial and money-getting
spirit which they are anxious to discourage; and one consequence of this
was that they were, less disposed to contend strenuously for the
inviolability of existing money-contracts. The conservative feeling on
this point was stronger among the mass than among the philosophers.
Plato even complains of it as inconveniently preponderant, and as
arresting the legislator in all comprehensive projects of reform. For
the most part, indeed, schemes of cancelling debts and redividing lands
were never thought of except by men of desperate and selfish ambition,
who made them stepping-stones to despotic power. Such men were
denounced alike by the practical sense of the community and by the
speculative thinkers: but when we turn to the case of the Spartan king,
Agis III, who proposed a complete extinction of debts and an equal
redivision of the landed property of the state, not with any selfish or
personal views, but upon pure ideas of patriotism, well or ill
understood, and for the purpose of renovating the lost ascendancy of
Sparta--we find Plutarch expressing the most unqualified admiration of